"Here [at Paine's house] gathered sympathetic spirits from America, England, France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, freed from prejudices of race, rank, or nationality."—Ibid.
"And now the old hotel became the republican capitol of Europe. There sat an international Premier with his Cabinet."—Ibid.
"A grand dinner was given by Paine at the Hotel de Ville to Dumouriez, where this brilliant general met Brissot, Condorcet, Santerre, and several eminent English radicals."—Ibid.
"In the beautiful courtyard of the Palais Royal, I saw today for the first time the statue of Camille Desmoulins, one of the most heroic figures of the French Revolution.... He was one of Paine's warmest friends in Paris. Desmoulins had known Paine when the latter was a member of the Convention and doubtless was one of the interesting coterie that met at Paine's house in the Faubourg St. Denis."—William M. van der Weyde.
"When Bonaparte returned from Italy he called on Paine and invited him to dinner."—Clio Rickman.
"Among the persons I was in the habit of receiving Paine deserves to be mentioned."—Madame Roland.
Among Paine's most intimate French friends, besides the Bonnevilles with whom he lived for several years, were the Rolands, the Brissots, the Condorcets, and the Lafayettes, France's purest and noblest souls.
Baron Pichon: "Paine lived in Monroe's house at Paris."
While James Monroe was minister to France Paine was for a year and a half a member of his household, enjoying in the highest degree the esteem of both Mr. and Mrs. Monroe.
Paine was one of the most amiable of men and possessed a most charming personality. Nicolas and Margaret Bonneville, with whom he resided in Paris, in a biographical sketch of him, written after his death and revised by Cobbett, bear this testimony: "Thomas Paine loved his friends with sincere and tender affection. His simplicity of heart and that happy kind of openness, or rather, carelessness, which charms our hearts in reading the fables of the good Lafontaine, made him extremely amiable. If little children were near him he patted them, searched his pockets for the store of cakes, biscuits, sugar-plums, pieces of sugar, of which he used to take possession as of a treasure belonging to them, and the distribution of which belonged to him."