13

REASON IN GOD AND MAN

THE REVOLUTION goes on; a man does not make the revolution, not a thousand men, not an army and not a party; the revolution comes from the people as they reach toward God, and a little of God is in each person and each will not forget it. Thus it is the revolution when slaves shake their chains and the revolution when a strong man bends toward a weaker and says, “Here, comrade, is my arm.” The revolution goes on and nothing stops it; but because the people are seeking what is good, not what is wicked or powerful or cruel or rich or venal, but simply what is good—because of that the people flounder and feel along one dark road after another. The people are no more all-seeing than their rulers once were; it is in intention that they differ.

Some of this, or all of it, Paine came to know, and he came to know that he was not the revolution, but only a man. There are no gods on earth, only men, and it had taken a long time for him to learn this.

His face was drawn, his figure leaner, his broad shoulders sloped more than ever as he entered the hall of the Convention once again. They had made no move to arrest him. “Let him run away,” Marat said. “Let him be off to the devil!” But Paine did not run away, and now he was back, his lips tight as he strode through a thousand fixed eyes to his seat.

There was a rustle and a murmur and the sound of many persons rising as Paine came back. Galleries and floor wanted to see him, the fool who walked back into the lion’s mouth. Paine found his place, stood a moment, looking from person to person, and then sat down.

“Citizen Paine,” the speaker acknowledged.

There was a ripple of applause, in spite of themselves. Paine wiped his eyes and stared at the floor.

St. Just attacked him, St. Just at his best, shouting, “I accuse you!”

Citizen Paine rose and came forward and asked, “Of what, sir—of what do you accuse me?”

“Of treason to France!”

“I committed no treason to France,” Paine said calmly.

St. Just went on to accuse Paine of being in illegitimate correspondence with part of the royal family outside of the country’s borders, at which Paine shook his head and said, “You are speaking to Tom Paine, sir.”

Even the galleries roared with applause at that. “Accuse me of many things,” Paine said. “Accuse me of being a republican, of being loyal to my friends, of loving an Englishman or a Frenchman as well as an American—but not of treason, sir, not of consorting with kings. I am not a young man; I have enough to look back upon, and I will not defend myself.”

St. Just said no more.

So Paine sat in the Convention, but said practically nothing. History was rushing on too fast, and he was left behind. He attended because he was a delegate and because he was practicing the only trade he knew, but there was nothing for him. And he was terribly alone, his friends in prison, others who might have been his friends avoiding him because he was suspect. A whole era was crowded into a week or a month. Marat died under Charlotte Corday’s dagger, and Robespierre took his place, a disarming man, so delicate and so French, but strong as iron and unbending as rock. A humanitarian, he called himself, telling Paine:

“I am of the people because I feel all their wants, their hurts, their pains, their sufferings. You were of the people once, were you not, Citizen Paine?” That was his way, to sink a barb deepest where it hurt most.

“I was a staymaker,” Paine said, “and a cobbler and I swept a weaver’s shop and I grubbed in the dirt for tuppence a week. I don’t speak of being of the people—”

And that was something that Robespierre would never forget.

Still, the new ruler of France was a man of iron; he had to be. All around the nation enemy armies were closing in; provinces were in full revolt, and here and there the counterrevolution had gained full control of a local district.

Reorganized, the Revolutionary Tribunal set to work, and there began that period known as The Terror. There was neither compromise nor mercy; either a man was loyal to the revolution or he was an enemy of the revolution, and if he was suspect he was more than likely to be considered an enemy. Day after day, crude carts trundled through the streets of Paris, their big wooden wheels groaning and squeaking, their bellies bulging with new victims for the guillotine. And day after day the big knife was wound up its scaffold and then released to fall upon another neck. From the king’s wife to a tavern keeper, to a simpering duke, to a midwife who had sheltered him. This was revolution in a way Paine had never dreamed of, not tall farmers who had always known that freedom was a part of their lives, but frightened little men who saw freedom for the first time in a thousand years, and were going to kill, kill, kill anything that stood in the way of its accomplishment. A dark cloud over Paris as the winter of 1793-1794 set in, a bloodstained cloud. Robespierre had to be a strong man.

And as the heads rolled, there died those friends of Paine’s who had made up the party of the Plain, or the Girondins. Traitorous, or deceived, or weak, or without understanding, or frightened, or brave, or cowardly, or righteous in the only way they knew, they all died, Roland and his wife, Condorcet, Brissot, Petion, Lebrun, Vergniaud, Buzot—all of them, all under the knife that was the dark door at the end of a dark lane into which liberty had wandered. Long live the Republic—and the Republic died too. Paris was a city of death.

During this time, Paine still attended the Convention. He had to; he had to make reason out of this dark thing that was happening, or else he could not live. What happened to good, simple men? What moved them? What drove them? Had they forgotten mercy, decency, goodness, or had the priests and the kings made those words so foul that they could never again have meaning? Paine had to know.

He had changed his living quarters from White’s Hotel to a farmhouse in the suburbs of Paris, a big, whitewashed stone-and-wood building that practiced a bucolic deception on a world that was falling apart. In many ways, this new home reminded Paine of an English yeoman farmer’s place, the bricked-in courtyard, a confusion of ducks, hens, geese, the flowers and the fruit trees and the stacked hay; again, it reminded him of Pennsylvania. He was of an age to be reminded of many things, all stacked away, layer upon layer, in his uneasy mind. With him at the farm were a few other English men and women, the same Johnson who had made the abortive suicide attempt, a Mr. and Mrs. Christie, a Mr. Adams, forlorn radicals who were radicals no longer, but had been swept aside by the current of revolution. They were poor company for Paine; their mutterings, their vague discontents, their fears were all at odds with his own terrible and personal problem.

Death mattered little to Paine. Though he hoped and prayed that it was not so, he had a feeling that most of his work was done. Things had gone beyond him; all he felt now was a dire need for rationalization, for reason in a world ruled by anarchy. Sometimes he would sit down at cards with the others, but cards were not for him. There was still a world beyond bits of pasteboard.

“I am Tom Paine,” he would remember, and then he would go back to Paris and plunge once more into the current of revolution. Some things he was still fitted for, and when it came to a matter of American policy, he would quietly give to the Jacobins all the knowledge and information he had. They got little enough out of the American ambassador, Gouverneur Morris.

That the turns of fortune had made Gouverneur Morris, Paine’s reactionary opponent in the old Philadelphia uprising, American ambassador to revolutionary France, was in itself something to evoke both tears and laughter. Paine thought he saw reason behind this seeming insanity. Morris, the aristocrat, was a living proof to Britain that in America the conservatives of ’eighty and ’eighty-one were again in the seat. They would play the game with England—all the way.

“We have to,” they would say. “We are a tiny, new nation, barely out of our birth pangs. Another war would finish us. At any price, we must preserve peace with England—and this French revolution—well, what have we to do with blood baths?” So they sent Morris to France as ambassador, the drawling, sneering Morris who had once remarked that Paine was neither clean nor genteel, but a piece of dirt wisely scrubbed from England’s skin.

In his own way, a completely unofficial way, Paine was America’s representative, doing small and large favors for the citizens of the land he had fought for, helping ship captains through the tangle of revolutionary customs and laws, serving however he could serve. James Farbee, for instance, a worthless soldier of fortune, not too bright, had been caught in a royalist plot that was no doing of his, and now waited for the thin steel blade to sever his head from his body. Paine came to see him in jail and said, “For fools like you, innocent men pay.”

Farbee protested that this was none of his fault; footloose and free and without a job at home after the war, and what does a man do who has known nothing else but fighting since the age of eighteen?

“And you were in the war?”

“I was, sir.”

“What command?”

“Greene’s, sir.”

“And who was lieutenant-quartermaster?”

“Franklin.”

“Captain-secretary?”

“Anderson, Grey, Chaplin, and I think, after that, Long.”

“Were you in the Jerseys?”

“Jersey and Pennsylvania, sir, and then the Carolinas. My God, sir, I was with you at Germantown, don’t you remember?”

Paine, appearing before the Revolutionary Tribunal, said, in slow, halting French, “Farbee must not die. He is a fool and a knave, but a soldier of the revolution. Are we all saints?”

And Far bee lived, just as Michael Peabody and Clare Henderson lived because Paine pleaded for them.

But all that was aside from the main problem which obsessed him, the problem of one more book remaining for him to write, who had produced both a reason for revolution and a handbook for revolution. Sitting in the big farmhouse, he scribbled, blotted, forced his thoughts, and realized with horror and agony that his old ease, fire, and facility were gone. He would cover a sheet with writing and then tear it up. He wrote words and they were not the right words. He was old, not so much in years as in usage of his big, peasant body, in the usage of a mind that burned itself as had few minds in all human history. It is a sad and woeful thing when a man loses the use of tools that give him reason to live. He would struggle as he had never before struggled, and then, giving up for the time, go to the Convention hall and sit and listen. The throbbing heart of the revolution was here, and here he pressed his thoughts. A reason and a motif came one day when Francis Partiff arose on the floor and screamed:

“God is dethroned, and Christianity, corrupt as a priest, is banished from earth! Henceforth, reason shall rule, pure reason, incorruptible reason!” And standing there, Partiff shredded a Bible, page by page.

Paine got up and left; he walked through the streets and saw a cart with four bodies for the knife. He came out by the river and saw a red sun setting over the old roofs of ancient Paris. God had died; Paine walked more and more slowly, and then the sun was gone, leaving nothing but the reflected goodness in the sky and a swallow to trace a pattern before it.

“And men, who are beginning to climb to God, to be like gods, disown him! Then there is blood on the earth, and they hate—how they hate!”

He went home and he wrote; it came more easily now, his painful script, capturing thought, building to a bolt that would be loosed on men and cry once more, “Here is Paine, the friend of man.” He wrote all night long, and toward dawn, he fell asleep, his head on the paper. In the morning, when Mrs. Christie came to bring him an egg and some tea, he was like that, his big head and shoulders sprawled over the desk, his breath ruffling the foolscap upon which he had scribbled. Unwilling to disturb him, knowing how many long and silent battles he had fought with insomnia, she set down the food and quietly went out.

About noon, Paine woke, had a cup of cold tea, and went back to his writing.

The Terror came closer, a black shawl drawing night over Paris, and by ones and twos the English radicals who shared the farmhouse with Paine fled, some to Switzerland, some to the north. Mrs. Christie begged Paine to go with her and her husband, but smiling curiously, he asked, “Where would I go?”

“Home.”

“And where is my home?” Paine wondered. “I made the world my village, and it’s too late to undo that.”

“And soon they will come for you with the cart.”

Paine shrugged. “If they think it necessary for me to die that the revolution may go on—” He shrugged again.

He was the only lodger left in the big farmhouse. His only companion was the landlord. And then the soldiers of the Republic came for the small, mustached Frenchman who owned the place, Georgeit, his name, with the dread warrant.

“But, Monsieur Paine, tell them,” the landlord pleaded. “Tell them I have neither schemed nor plotted.”

“It is no use to tell them. They do what they have to do. Go with them, my friend; there is nothing else to do and no other way. Go with them—”

And then Paine was entirely and completely alone, alone and unafraid, sitting at his desk and writing a thing which he proposed to call The Age of Reason.

“Let me write in letters of fire, for I am unafraid. Tomorrow I will die, or the next day. There is so much death that I have become a part of it, and that way I have lost my fear. They told me to run away, but where can Paine go? To America? They have no use for an old revolutionist in America today—indeed, I do not know that they would recognize me in America. The tall man from Mt. Vernon is not the comrade in arms that I once knew; he has forgotten how we marched down through Jersey. To England? A hundred years from now they will welcome me in the land where I was born. My work is in France and France must be the savior of the world, and if they take Paine’s life, what is the loss?”

The Age of Reason, written in large letters, and underlined three times. An offering for the new world, for the brave, credulous, frightened new world, which had come out of his hands as much as out of any other’s. The new world had renounced God, and thereby, to Paine’s way of thinking, they had renounced the reason for man to exist. Man is a part of God, or else he is a beast; and beasts know love and fear and hate and hunger—but not exultation. As Paine saw it now, man’s history was a vision of godliness. From the deep, dark morass he had come, from the jungles and the lonely mountains and the windswept steppes, and always his way had been the way of the seeker. He made civilization and he made a morality and he made a pact of brotherhood. One day, he ceased to kill the aged and venerated them, ceased to kill the sick and healed them, ceased to kill the lost and showed them how to find themselves. He had a dream and a vision, and Isaiah was one of his number, as was Jesus of Nazareth. He offered a hand, saying, Thou art my brother, and do I not know thee? And he began to see God, like going up a ladder, rung after rung, always closer to a something that had been waiting eternally. First wooden images, then marble ones, the sun and the stars, and then a just, unseen singleness, and then an unseen one of love and mercy, and then a gentle Jew nailed onto a cross and dying in pain. Man does not stop; he will be free and the brotherhood world wide, and a musket is fired in a Massachusetts village—

And now the revolution, gone down an uncharted road, sick of an organized, venal, preying church, had embraced the godlessness of nothing and nowhere. So Paine told himself, “I will write one more book and tell them what I know of a God that has not failed me.” And he began:

“It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion; I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and, from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I intend it to be the last offering I shall make to my fellow citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it, could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.

“The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of the priesthood and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest, in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.

“As several of my colleagues, and others of my fellow citizens of France, have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself.

“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

“I believe the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.

“But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe and my reasons for not believing them.

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

That way, there was a beginning; he put down what he believed, what he did not believe, and then he labored, day after day, in the old, deserted farmhouse. He was not fashioning a creed; men had done that already, as much by acts as by words. Christ on a cross had fashioned it and so had a rustic boy dying on a village green in New England. So had a thousand and a hundred thousand others. It remained only for him to formulate it and put it in place as the last work in his encyclopedia of revolution.

During those quiet days when he worked on The Age of Reason, he did not go into old Paris very often. Once to seek for a Bible written in English; Bibles there were in plenty, but all in French, and for the life of him he could not lay hands on a King James version. That made it harder for him, having to work on out of his memory, seeking back to all the times in his childhood when he had read certain passages over and over, quoting as he worked, sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. The Bible was necessary, for in writing down a faith that could be accepted by a reasonable man, a gentle man, a good man, he had to tear apart, boldly and ruthlessly, the whole fabric of superstition that had been woven through the ages.

Often he was tempted to send to England for the work he needed, but the passage of even a piece of mail was long and uncertain, and Paine was driven by a deadly sense of urgency. No one, living in or about Paris as the year of 1793 drew to a close, could forget the pall of The Terror. It had lost meaning and reason, and struck about as wildly as a maddened beast. First it had been the right, but now Jacobins of the extreme left joined the procession to the guillotine. What Paine had feared most was coming about, the dictatorship of violence gone amuck.

On one of his trips into Paris, Paine looked up an old acquaintance of his, Joel Barlow, whom he had helped once when Barlow was in legal difficulties with a French court.

“Whatever happens,” Paine said, “I don’t care too much, but I’ve been working on a manuscript that will soon be finished and that means a great deal to me. If they come for me, can I entrust the manuscript to you?”

“Gladly,” Barlow nodded, and then begged Paine to leave for America.

“In good time,” Paine nodded. “When my work in France is over.”

He had finished his book; his credo was down on paper, and he felt a complete and wonderful sense of relief, the feeling of a man washed clean and rested. He had struck a blow at atheism, and he had—or so he believed—given the people of France and of the world a rational creed to sustain them through the years of revolution that he saw ahead. He had proclaimed God in all that man saw, in the perfect symmetry of a leaf, in a rosy sunset, in a million stars cast like a hood in the night, in the earth, in the sea, in all creation. He told them not to look for cheap, tawdry miracles, when they themselves and the world they lived in were the greatest of all miracles.

He told them to believe in God because they and the world they inhabited were the strongest proof of God. God’s work was creation; His bible and proof were creation. It was a blazing, living, signed document, and it required neither superstitions nor horror tales to support it. It was Tom Paine to France, saying, “If you choose atheism now, I, at least, have done my part.”

On one of his short trips to Paris, he had gone to the Convention hall and told the doorkeeper in very bad French, “Deputy Thomas Paine, representing Calais,” and the doorkeeper stared as if he had seen a ghost. And others stared; all over the hall brows raised and necks craned as they turned to look at him.

There was only one of the old radical group of foreign expatriates left in the hall, Anacharsis Clootz, the Prussian, one of the extreme left, a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a socialist before there was socialism, a little mad, a great deal brilliant, unafraid, vehemently outspoken, much like Paine and very much unlike him. Until now, they had worked together occasionally, but not easily; Paine was a republican, an advocate of democracy; Clootz was the advocate of a social conception, the theory of which hardly existed. He waved at Paine now, and afterwards, leaving the hall, got close to him and called:

“Hello there, my old friend, where have you been?”

“Writing.”

“They all write before they go to the Madam Guillotine. And what nonsense this time?”

“Gods and men.”

Clootz was a militant atheist; he held his stomach now, roaring with laughter and calling after Paine, “We will discuss that, no?”

They were to discuss it soon enough.

His time had about run out; he had desired a reprieve, not out of any great desire to go on living a life that for all practical purposes was over, but because, as so often before, he had something which he felt he must put down on paper. But now that it was done, he went to meet his fate almost eagerly. They would not have to seek him; he was no recluse, and he had never fled from a judgment. Already, he had been too long alone in the big farmhouse; that was not for Paine; for Paine was the feel of his fellow men, their nearness, their voices and their smiles and their good intimacies. So he packed together the few things he had, the finished manuscript, some other papers, a book or two and some shirts and underclothes—not a great deal, but he had never been one for worldly possessions. If a man makes the world his castle, he does not seek to furnish it.

He returned to Paris and White’s Hotel, to raised brows and breath softly drawn in. “Still here, Paine?”

“Still here.”

And such whispered comments as, “Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.”

And behind his back, slick, a finger across a throat—“If he wants to, that’s his own affair.”

He ordered a brandy, he proposed a toast, “To the Republic of France, forever, gentlemen!” And no one knew whether to laugh or to deride.

On Christmas Day, a motion was put forward in the hall to exclude all foreigners from seats in the Convention. There were only two foreigners left, Paine and Clootz, and it was at them that the move was directed. Paine had seen this coming; he knew it when he returned to the city, when he made the toast to the Republic, when he finally went to bed to sleep what might be his last night as a free man. He was not afraid; he wanted it to come quickly; no longer a deputy of France, he wanted the surge of the revolution to overtake him, to devour him if it must.

And in the early dawn, it came.

Thus—there were two agents of the Committee of General Security pounding on the door of his room and unrolling their imposing warrant when he came in his nightshirt to let them in.

“For Citizen Paine! And you, monsieur, are Citizen Paine?”

“I am,” he smiled. “Come in, gentlemen.”

The two agents were followed by one corporal and four privates. The corporal took his place at the foot of Paine’s bed, after saluting, the privates on either side.

“Permit me to dress,” Paine said. The corporal graciously nodded and the two agents set about searching the room. Paine poured them each a brandy, and the privates stared intently at nothing at all. “Excellent brandy,” the agents admitted, and went on with their searching.

When he was dressed, Paine asked, “I would like to know—the charge—”

“Monsieur Merson,” one of the agents introduced himself, a small tribute to the brandy, and read from the warrant, “Conspiring against the Republic.”

“Conspiring against the Republic,” Paine repeated, softly and tiredly. “Citizen Paine is under arrest for conspiracy. He sits alone in an empty farmhouse and broods about God, and thereby the Republic is endangered. I wonder whether the shortest thing in the world is not the memory of men.” He had spoken in English; when the agents raised their brows, he shook his head. “Nothing, nothing—I have some papers at the Britain House, may we go there and get them?” pouring another brandy for each.

“Not entirely in order,” Merson shrugged. “But when one arrests a citizen one admires, so reluctantly, one may make an exception.”

At the Britain House, Barlow was waiting, and Paine gave him the manuscript of The Age of Reason.

“I wish to God you had left France,” Barlow said.

“And I may, sooner than I expected,” Paine answered ruefully. “Barlow, this thing I wrote may be trash, but to me it’s very dear—in the loose talk of an old man, the finish of a life. If I go to the guillotine, try to have it published. I have some friends in America; the printers in Philadelphia would do me another turn, for the sake of old times. There’s Jefferson and Washington—I think they remember me. If you have to, play on their feelings, tell them, recall to them an old soldier in the times that tried men’s souls.”

“Don’t be a damn fool,” Barlow muttered.

M. Merson said, “Please, citizen, I have been good enough to allow you pass on your book and gullible enough to come here and meet your friend. But now we must go.”

“Where are you taking him?” Barlow demanded.

“To the Luxembourg, for the time.”

On their way to the prison, they stopped off long enough to arrest Anacharsis Clootz, and then, with soldiers on either side, the two ex-deputies were marched through the streets. Clootz was bubbling with suppressed mirth; there was something diabolical in the way he regarded this last march. “So we go, friend Paine,” he chuckled, “you at one end of the long bar of revolution, I on the other, and in the end it makes no difference to the good Lady Guillotine. She will go chop, once, twice, and then it will be a finish to Paine and Clootz—and to what else, old friend? Who can tell?”

“But why? They accuse me of being a traitor to the Republic, a charge I don’t have to answer. The name of Paine is answer enough. But of what do they accuse you?”

Clootz let go with a furious burst of laughter. “You are an old man, Paine, so even the remarkably simple becomes greatly involved. You are a republican, and I am, to coin a phrase for our times, a proletarian. You believe in the democratic method through representation, and I believe in the same method through the will of the masses. You say, let the people rule; I say the same thing; we are after the same thing, only in different ways. I believe that your way is hopeless, part of the past; but otherwise we are the same, and the dictatorship, which this Republic of France is fast becoming, does not want us. Therefore, chop, chop—let the good Lady Guillotine take care of everything.”

They continued toward the prison, and for a while Clootz was silent, his bushy brows puckered intently, and to Paine it seemed that the German had finally realized his destination and his fate. But suddenly Clootz swung on him and roared,

“What is this nonsense you write, Paine, about the creation being the Bible of God?”

“A simple fact which I believe.”

“Which you believe!” Clootz snorted, stopping the march and turning on Paine, arms akimbo. “You repudiate organized religion and substitute mystical rationalization! My friend, Paine, you shock me. With you I spend some of my last precious hours. On every hand people in the streets turn to stare at us and whisper to each other, There are Paine and Clootz on their way to the guillotine. These good soldiers, these two agents of what calls itself the Republic of France, will go home to their soup and their wives with the news that they marched the last march with the two greatest minds of the eighteenth century. And you rationalize about the creation being the Bible of God. What creation?”

“Of course, it happened!” Paine snapped. “Atheism, the great creed of chance! Like a game of cards, everything just fell together until it fitted nicely!”

“And why not? Where is reason, but in our minds? Where is godliness, but in the people? Where is mercy, but in the masses? A thing becomes reasonable because we make it reasonable, and we are not reaching toward God, but toward goodness, a formulation of the people, a concept of small, suffering men—”

M. Merson interrupted, “Please, please, citizens, we are on our way to the Luxembourg jail. I pray you not to argue, for it is unseemly in men going our way.” And they continued on their way, Clootz roaring his theories at the top of his lungs.

It had been the Palace of Luxembourg before the revolution; now it was the house of arrest, the last stop. It stood in the famous old gardens where all was beauty, so that the many who went to the guillotine could bring a good last memory with them, and in no place was horror and warmth so neatly and terribly combined. Great rooms, high ceilings, tugs and tapestries and gilt chairs, and death. If you sat with your friends and mused of things that were far away, large things and beautiful, such as men in prison bring to life with words, the green hills of Pennsylvania, the white cliffs of Dover, the moors of the north country, the Palisades on a cold, windy winter day, a storm at sea or a sunrise at sea; and musing upon those things heard a series of piercing shrieks, moans and groans and fervent calling upon God, you pretended not to notice—for it is saddest of all things to contemplate human beings going to their deaths. But you thought to yourself, the duchess, perhaps—or the wife of the little man who kept a tobacco shop on the Rue St. Denis—or the quiet woman in black who has no identity at all.

You kept your quarters clean even if you had never kept quarters clean before, for you acquired at the threshold of the grave a fastidious sense of delicacy. You acquired humility, whether you were a count or a butcher, for here were all classes living in the most incredible little democracy the world had ever known. When you wept, you tried not to show your tears to others, for early in your stay at the Luxembourg you saw the quiet contagion of tears, twenty persons in a room where one began to weep, and then another, and then another—and then all.

You came to admire the French if you had never admired them before, the way they faced death, the way they could joke about it, the way with a simple, expressive shrug of their shoulders they could divest it of all importance. You found a people from chimney sweep to duke so wonderfully civilized that even while you were dying because a revolution had gone amuck, you never for once doubted that in France was the salvation of mankind. You came to know M. Benoît, the jailor, who would sometimes say, with a deprecatory smile, “I must have a large heart— How do I know, monsieur?—because whenever one of my charges goes away, a part of my heart goes with him. You who are here die once—and how many times do I die? A hundred? A thousand? Why don’t I go away, monsieur? Who would replace me? I am not a saint, but not a villain.”

You heard people say, “It is The Terror. It is the war.” Not complainingly, but with an acceptance of the fact that explained a little how this strange, sunny land had once lived through a hundred-year war that had desolated three quarters of it.

You would be with a group, and a door would open, and there would be a new one among you, Benoît leading him in and asking apologetically, “There will be some friends of yours, perhaps? You must make your best, and I will do my part,” and turning around you would recognize him. Others recognize him too, some with bewilderment, some with a trace of satisfaction, but they all greet him as if he were coming to a club and not to a last stopping place.

Your old, good friend has learned that tomorrow it will be his turn, and he asks you to take a walk with him in the garden. Arm in arm, you stroll around the court, around and around, never once mentioning that this is the last walk on the last cold, winter afternoon, and looking at the gray winter sky, you realize the beauty of what was never beautiful before. The snow begins to fall, and your friend lays the palm of his hand against the melting flakes and reminds you that here is a great wonder of existence, so many snowstorms, so many flakes, so many countless millions of them, and yet all different, never two the same. “A wonder of infinity for us who delude ourselves with our greatness.”

Or the mother of the boy, Benjamin, comes to you with word that they are taking him, he who is only seventeen. “A child, a baby, an innocent,” she pleads with you. “Yesterday, I nursed him at my breast, just yesterday. What could he have done to deserve death?”

You don’t know, and you try, with the foolish, blundering ways of a man, to comfort the mother. And then you go in to the boy, who, looking at you so trustingly, asks with his eyes for you to clear away the great mystery of death.

And so time passes, and presently there is no world at all except the Luxembourg Prison.

In the beginning, Paine had hope. He did not want to die; no one wants to die, and in this case, Paine had committed no crime, had indulged in no act of treason, and had consistently expressed his faith in both the Republic and the revolution. It was true that he had voted with and consorted with a party now overthrown and discredited, but even in that situation his motives had never been suspect, and he had been deliberately acquitted when the others went to the scaffold. Why then should he be held in prison? Treason? If there were a thousand men who hated Paine, accusing him of almost every crime known to man, they at least left treason out of the roster. In his fidelity to what he believed, he had never faltered.

Nor could he accept his fate with the laughing abandon, shown first by Clootz and later by Danton. Well enough for them to find this whole business of mankind so amusing that death under the guillotine seemed the final jest in a ridiculous comedy. Paine had always loved life; the simple fact of living was an adventure, each new face presented to him an added bit of happiness. He was gregarious to an extreme, not merely loving his fellow men, but feeling a passionate need for them, without which life could not be endured. He had a sense of property which, not fixing itself on some little bit of acreage, had embraced the whole world.

So in the beginning he had hope, and he fought for his freedom. Not only was he a citizen of France; first and foremost, he was a citizen of America; he had weaned a piece of that land, he had nursed it and seen it out of its swaddling clothes. Therefore, he could, without shame or conscience, call on America in this hour of his need.

As simple as that; he got word to his friends, Barlow and a few others, to put pressure on Morris, the ambassador, and have him obtain Paine’s release. And it was as simple as that, for the only nation in all the world revolutionary France could look to for friendship was America.

It was a situation to delight Morris’s heart. There was a time in Philadelphia when the people rose up against a small group that would have turned the American revolution to their own ends; and the leader of the people was Paine, and one of the small group was Gouverneur Morris. There was a time when a revolutionary tribunal was set up in Philadelphia, and one of those who sat in the tribunal was Tom Paine, and one of those it passed judgment upon was Gouverneur Morris. “So slowly do the wheels of fate turn,” Morris mused, “but so aptly.” How many years had he waited for this moment—twelve? thirteen? A man forgets the years, but some things a man does not forget. In this land of shopkeepers and pigs, Paine and Clootz had walked to jail through the streets of Paris, arguing aloud their respective modes of atheism; yes, Morris had heard of that. What a glorious opportunity when a man can avenge his own feud and serve God at the same time. As brief insurance, Morris wrote to Jefferson, who represented all that was left in America of the revolution, the people and the ideals which made it:

“… I must mention, that Thomas Paine is in prison, where he amuses himself with publishing a pamphlet against Jesus Christ. I do not recollect whether I mentioned to you, that he would have been executed along with the rest of the Brissotines, if the adverse party had not viewed him with contempt. I incline to think that, if he is quiet in prison, he may have the good luck to be forgotten. Whereas, should he be brought much into notice, the long suspended ax might fall on him. I believe he thinks, that I ought to claim him as an American citizen; but, considering his birth, his naturalization in this country, and the place he filled, I doubt much the right, and I am sure that the claim would be, for the present at least, inexpedient and ineffectual.…”

That done, Morris proceeded, with a clear conscience, to serve both his God and his country. The first step was to have Paine guillotined, which would be a service to the Almighty, and the second to break relations with France for that very thing, which would turn the service of the Almighty to the ends of the Hamiltonian party in America. To Barlow, Morris said:

“Paine is out of my hands entirely, a citizen of France, you know.”

“But a citizen of America first!”

“I prefer to believe that Americans are not his ilk. I prefer to cherish some small respect for my native land.…”

And to Robespierre, “Really, sir, I would not stand in your way if Paine’s execution were necessary to the welfare of the French Republic.”

“And you might not be displeased,” Robespierre said keenly.

“One doesn’t commit oneself on such matters.”

“Yet if Paine goes to the guillotine,” Robespierre speculated, measuring Morris with his small, bright, merciless eyes, “there might be some displeasure in certain sections of your land. The militia, for instance, who fought with Paine, might remember him and object to his death; and Jefferson might remember that Paine once wrote a book called Common Sense.”

“I assure you, sir, that neither the militia of a war that was over ten years ago nor Thomas Jefferson exerts too much influence upon the foreign policy of President Washington’s government.”

“Yet even your President Washington, if he needed a reason—speaking purely theoretically, you understand—might recall that once he and Paine were comrades in arms and, recalling that, might play upon the sympathies of the American people—”

“If you insinuate—”

“I insinuate nothing,” Robespierre said quietly. “It is Monsieur the American ambassador who insinuates. Meanwhile the good Lady Guillotine drinks enough. When Paine’s time comes, he will taste the justice of France, and until then Monsieur the American ambassador must wait patiently. Monsieur the American ambassador must not expect the French Republic to use its tribunals for personal—”

“That is enough, sir,” Morris said.

Yet all in all, he was content to wait. He had waited a long time, and what were a few weeks or months more?

To Paine, none of this was apparent, as in the Luxembourg weeks stretched into months. He heard of a petition on his behalf put forward in the Convention by Americans living in Paris, and he heard of the sneering reply the aging president of the Convention made. He heard of a correspondence between the French foreign minister and Morris, and he took it in good faith. True enough, Morris did not like him, but one does not send a man one dislikes to his death. As time went on and absolutely nothing was done about his imprisonment, Paine’s hope ebbed, but it never entirely vanished.

The Terror became more terrible, and the flow of victims to the guillotine was speeded up. A dread silence settled over the Luxembourg, a tightening of restrictions, a severing of all bonds with the outside world. Weeks and months passed, and no man left the place except for a single reason.

It came time for Clootz to go, and he waved to Paine and laughed, “Now, my deistic friend, I shall see which of us is right on this question of God, while you sit here and rack your poor brains.”

And Danton, going the same way to the same bloody blade, shook hands with Paine, smiling rather sadly, and murmuring, “What a foolish, foolish world, fit only for children and idiots!”

And Luzon said, softly, fervently, “Good-by, my friend Paine. You shall not want for comrades, if they have republics over there.”

And Ronsin said, “You will be lonely, Paine. The whole world we knew has already passed.”

Twenty one night, forty the next, over two hundred one terrible time. The gentle Benoît was no longer jailer; a hulking, sadistic brute called Guiard became custodian of the old palace; he closed off the courtyard and denied the prisoners a little air and a little sky before they met their deaths. He told them:

“Speak, and you are overheard. Plot, and I know what you are plotting. Guiard never sleeps.”

In a fashion, it was true; he had the place filled with his spies, and a word was enough to send a man to the guillotine.

In this hellishness, Paine became something more than a man; he became a spirit and a faith; he became consolation and redemption. He knew when to smile—and a smile was the only thing on earth these poor devils could be given. He knew the few words that could help a man go to his death; he knew a phrase to console a mother. He was tireless, without fear, without hesitation. Gaunt, his health failing, nevertheless the mere sight of his big, angular figure entering a room was enough to cheer the occupants. “It is Monsieur Paine—come in, come in.” He had a vast fund of stories, the drawling, American frontier jokes, which translated into his very bad French made almost no sense at all, but which were funny and pointless enough to send the poor devils who heard them into aching laughter. And he knew when to call up mirth; he knew when to be silent, when his mere presence was enough, when a word was enough.

And man after man, woman after woman, going to meet their death, said, “Send for Citizen Paine.”

He lay in his bare room; he waxed hot and cold with fever; time lost meaning for him and disappeared. The fever came and receded, like undulating waves of fire, and he lived in a nightmarish world, populated by saints and devils. Vaguely he sensed that men were entering and leaving; screams sometimes made him wonder where he was, and in a moment of clarity, he heard a man say:

“This wretch is dying.”

And it mattered little or not at all, for the fever always returned, burning him, chilling him, burning him again.

Then, after a long, long time, sanity returned. He asked what month it was.

“July—”

And he counted, “January, February, March—”

“I am still in the Luxembourg?”

“Quite true, citizen, but matters have changed. Robespierre is dead. St. Just is dead. Take heart, citizen. The Terror is over.”

“So The Terror is over,” Paine sighed, and that night he slept without dreams.

It is difficult to regain one’s strength in prison, even if one does not live in hourly fear of death. Paine, looking in a glass again, found a gray-haired stranger confronting him, a sunken face that was etched all over with lines and wrinkles. It made him smile, so much a stranger was the image, and the smile that the mirror returned him was hollow and mocking.

The beast, Guiard, had passed on with the downfall of Robespierre’s government, and Arden, the new jailer, allowed the prisoners the freedom of the courtyard. Paine could walk again in the blessed sunlight; it was summer, and he could smell the flowers and watch the strollers in the gardens and mark the little clouds as they scudded overhead. The whole air of the Luxembourg had changed; it was still a prison, but it was not a death house. People left, again by the tens and twenties, but now they passed through the gates to freedom.

For the time being, Paine had little to do but to think—to contemplate the events of the past six months, the strange silence which had abandoned him during that time when the Luxembourg was a place of horror. Why had Morris made no effort to secure his freedom? he asked himself. Why had the American nation remained completely passive? Did it mean nothing to George Washington that Paine was in prison, perhaps to be guillotined any day? The whole attitude of Washington was incomprehensible. Why had he never really expressed his thanks to Paine for inscribing to him The Rights of Man? Had he forgotten that the country he presided over now was born out of revolution?

During the long days Paine spent recuperating from his sickness he brooded long and often over what had happened to America during these past years. Most difficult of all was to believe ill of that man who had seemed to him, for so many years, better and truer than any other man he had known, George Washington.

And then there was a ray of hope. Gouverneur Morris was no longer minister to France; James Monroe, a Jeffersonian democrat, had replaced him. Eagerly, Paine waited for Monroe’s arrival, and once he was installed, sent him a long memorial, pleading his case and begging Monroe to make some effort to obtain his freedom. Monroe answered with a cheerful and hopeful reply, that he would work on the case and that Paine could expect liberation soon.

Yet it didn’t come; the summer was over and another winter began, and almost all the other prisoners who had been with Paine in the Luxembourg had been freed; but he remained. It was fever again, sores developing in his side, his big, strong body finally crumbling under ten long months of imprisonment. His hand barely able to hold a pen, he wrote to Monroe again.

Barlow came to see him, and looking at the American with dulled eyes, Paine said barely a word.

“Paine?”

“It was never the dying I minded,” Paine whispered. “But to have it drawn out like this; is more than I can bear.”

Then Monroe wrote to the Committee of General Security, “The services which he [Paine] rendered them [the people of America] in their struggle for liberty have made an impression, of gratitude which will never be erased, whilst they continue to merit the character of a just and generous people. He is now in prison, languishing under a disease, and which must be increased by his confinement. Permit me, then, to call your attention to his situation, and to require that you will hasten his trial in case there be any charge against him, and if there be none, you will cause him to be set at liberty.”

And it was done; in November, 1794, Tom Paine was released from Luxembourg Palace, not the man who had entered, but one sick and old and gray-haired.