"In that maelstrom of thought, in that pandemonium of words, in that whirlwind of passion, pleading for the life of the king, Thomas Paine, not counting his own life, well knowing the consequences of his act, Thomas Paine stood there and pleaded that the life of the king might be spared."—Dr. J. E. Roberts.
A. F. Bertrand de Moleville (French Minister of State): "It must be recorded to the eternal shame of this assembly, that Thomas Paine... proved himself the wisest, the most humane, the boldest—in a word, the most innocent among them."
Victor Hugo: "Thomas Paine, an American and merciful."
"When tidings came of the king's trial and execution, whatever glimpses they [Paine's adherents in England] gained of their outlawed leader showed him steadfast as a star caught in one wave and another of that turbid tide. Many, alas, needed apologies, but Paine required none. That one Englishman, standing on the tribune for justice and humanity, amid three hundred angry Frenchmen in uproar, was as sublime a sight as Europe witnessed in those days."—Dr. Conway.
"The rank and file followed their Thomas Paine with a faith that crowned heads might envy. The London men knew Paine thoroughly. The treasures of the world would not draw him, nor any terrors drive him, to the side of cruelty and inhumanity. Their eye was upon him. Had Paine, after the king's execution, despaired of the republic there might have ensued some demoralization among his followers in London. But they saw him by the side of the delivered prisoner of the Bastile, Brissot, an author well known in England, by the side of Condorcet and others of Franklin's honored circle engaged in a death struggle with the fire-breathing dragon called 'The Mountain.' That was the same unswerving man they had been following, and to all accusations against the revolution their answer was—Paine is still there."—Ibid.
While Paine allied himself to no particular faction of the convention, his sympathies were with the Girondins. Lamartine says: "Paine, the friend of Madame Roland, Condorcet and Brissot, had been elected by the town of Calais; the Girondins consulted him and placed him on the committee of surveyance." The Girondins comprised, for the most part, the wisest and the best of France's legislators. Had they remained in power the excesses of the revolution would, to a great extent, have been avoided. But in an evil hour the Jacobins gained the ascendancy and while they ruled madness reigned supreme. The Girondins were slaughtered or expelled. In one night twenty-two of them—every one a noted statesman or orator—the very flower of French manhood, "the eloquent, the young, the beautiful, the brave," as Riouffe, their fellow prisoner, lovingly describes them, were taken before a Jacobin tribunal and condemned to death. Carlyle thus graphically and pathetically tells us how they died:
"All Paris is out; such a crowd as no man had seen. The death-carts, Valaze's cold corpse [he had committed suicide] stretched among the yet living twenty-one, roll along. Bareheaded, hands bound, in their shirt sleeves, coat flung loosely round the neck; so fare the eloquent of France; bemurmured, beshouted. To the shouts of Vive la Republique, some of them keep answering with counter shouts of Vive la Republique. Others, as Brissot, sit sunk in silence. At the foot of the scaffold they again strike up, with appropriate variations, the hymn of the Marseilles. Such an act of music; conceive it well! The yet living chant there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak! Samson's axe is rapid; one head per minute, or a little less. The chorus is wearing weak; the chorus is worn out; farewell, forevermore, ye Girondins. Te-Deum Fauchet has become silent; Valaze's dead head is lopped; the sickle of the guillotine has reaped the Girondins all away."
"How Paine loved those men—Brissot, Condorcet, Lasource, Duchatel, Vergniaud, Gensonne! Never was man more devoted to his intellectual comrades. Even across a century one may realize what it meant to him, that march of his best friends to the scaffold."—Dr. Conway.
Eight days after the execution of the Girondins another of Paine's friends, Madame Roland, the "Inspiring Soul" of the Girondins—one of the greatest, one of the fairest, one of the bravest, and one of the noblest women that ever came to brighten our planet—died on the same scaffold. Beautiful in life, Madame Roland rose to sublimity in death. Standing on the scaffold, robed in white, she seemed like a lovely bride before the altar. She asked for pen and paper to record "the strange thoughts that were rising in her" as she gazed into the eyes of death. This request denied, she turned toward the statue of liberty and, with tearful eyes, exclaimed, "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" Then, seeing the one who was to have preceded her to the guillotine trembling with fear, she begged and obtained permission to take his place—to die first—that she might soften the terrors of death by showing him "how easy it is to die." This is her picture—painted by Carlyle: "Noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud eyes, long black hair flowing down to the girdle; and as brave a heart as ever beat in woman's bosom! Like a white Grecian statue, serenely complete, she shines in that black wreck of things;—long memorable."
"What with the arrestations and flights Paine found himself, in June, almost alone. In the convention he was sometimes the solitary figure left on the plain, where but now sat the brilliant statesmen of France. They, his beloved friends, have started in procession towards the guillotine, for even flight must end there; daily others are pressed into their ranks; his own summons, he feels, is only a question of a few weeks or days."—Dr. Conway.