* I am indebted for this letter to Dr. John S. H. Fogg, of
Boston. The letter is endorsed by Jefferson, "Rec'd Mar.
3." (1794.)
Thus has finally faded the dream of Paine's life—an international republic.
It is notable that in this letter Paine makes no mention of his own danger. He may have done so in the previous letter, unfound, to which he alludes. Why he made no attempt to escape after Amar's report seems a mystery, especially as he was assisting others to leave the country. Two of his friends, Johnson and Choppin—the last to part from him in the old garden,—escaped to Switzerland. Johnson will be remembered as the young man who attempted suicide on hearing of Marat's menaces against Paine. Writing to Lady Smith of these two friends, he says:
"He [Johnson] recovered, and being anxious to get out of France, a passport was obtained for him and Mr. Choppin; they received it late in the evening, and set off the next morning for Basle, before four, from which place I had a letter from them, highly pleased with their escape from France, into which they had entered with an enthusiasm of patriotic devotion. Ah, France! thou hast ruined the character of a revolution virtuously begun, and destroyed those who produced it. I might also say like Job's servant, 'and I only am escaped.'
"Two days after they were gone I heard a rapping at the gate, and looking out of the window of the bedroom I saw the landlord going with the candle to the gate, which he opened; and a guard with muskets and fixed bayonets entered. I went to bed again and made up my mind for prison, for I was the only lodger. It was a guard to take up Johnson and Choppin, but, I thank God, they were out of their reach.
"The guard came about a month after, in the night, and took away the landlord, George. And the scene in the house finished with the arrestation of myself. This was soon after you called on me, and sorry I was that it was not in my power to render to Sir [Robert Smith] the service that you asked."
All then had fled. Even the old landlord had been arrested. In the wintry garden this lone man—in whose brain and heart the republic and the religion of humanity have their abode—moves companionless. In the great mansion, where once Madame de Pompadour glittered amid her courtiers, where in the past summer gathered the Round Table of great-hearted gentlemen and ladies. Thomas Paine sits through the watches of the night at his devout task.*
"My friends were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off, and as I expected, every day, the same fate, I resolved to begin my work. I appeared to myself to be on my death bed, for death was on every side of me, and I had no time to lose. This accounts for my writing at the time I did, and so nicely did the time and intention meet, that I had not finished the first part of the work more than six hours before I was arrested and taken to prison. The people of France were running headlong into atheism, and I had the work translated in their own language, to stop them in that career, and fix them to the first article of every man's creed, who has any creed at all—I believe in God."**
* It was a resumed task. Early in the year Paine had brought
to his colleague Lanthenas a manuscript on religion,
probably entitled "The Age of Reason." Lanthenas translated
it, and had it printed in French, though no trace of its
circulation appears. At that time Lanthenas may have
apprehended blood about to be shed, the tribute to one that
was pierced in trying to benefit mankind.
** Letter to Samuel Adams. The execution of the
Girondins took place on October 31st.
The second Christmas of the new republican era dawns. Where is the vision that has led this wayworn pilgrim? Where the star he has followed so long, to find it hovering over the new birth of humanity? It may have been on that day that, amid the shades of his slain friends, he wrote, as with the proscription which fell on him, with the other Girondins, in May, and took the precaution to show Paine's essay to Couthon, who, with Robespierre, had religious matters particularly in charge. Couthon frowned on the work and on Paine, and reproached Lanthenas for translating it. There was no frown more formidable than that of Couthon, and the essay (printed only in French) seems to have been suppressed. At the close of the year Paine wrote the whole work de novo. The first edition in English, now before me, was printed in Paris, by Barrois, 1794. In his preface to Part II., Paine implies a previous draft in saying: "I had not finished it more than six hours, in the state it has since appeared, before a guard came," etc (The italics are mine.) The fact of the early translation appears in a letter of Lanthenas to Merlin de Thionville.