"Citizens Representatives,—Though it is not convenient to me, in the present situation of my affairs, to subscribe to the loan towards the descent upon England, my economy permits me to make a small patriotic donation. I send a hundred livres, and with it all the wishes of my heart for the success of the descent, and a voluntary offer of any service I can render to promote it.
"There will be no lasting peace for France, nor for the world, until the tyranny and corruption of the English government be abolished, and England, like Italy, become a sister republic. As to those men, whether in England, Scotland, or Ireland, who, like Robespierre in France, are covered with crimes, they, like him, have no other resource than in committing more. But the mass of the people are the friends of liberty: tyranny and taxation oppress them, but they deserve to be free.
"Accept, Citizens Representatives, the congratulations of an old colleague in the dangers we have passed, and on the happy prospect before us. Salut et respect.
"Thomas Paine."
Coupe added: "The gift which Thomas Paine offers you appears very trifling, when it is compared with the revolting injustice which this faithful friend of liberty has experienced from the English government; but compare it with the state of poverty in which our former colleague finds himself, and you will then think it considerable." He moved that the notice of this gift and Thomas Paine's letter be printed. "Mention honorable et impression," adds the Moniteur.
The President of the Directory at this time was Larevéllière-Lépeaux, a friend of the Theophilanthropic Society. To him Paine gave, in English, which the president understood, a plan for the descent, which was translated into French, and adopted by the Directory. Two hundred and fifty gun-boats were built, and the expedition abandoned. To Jefferson, Paine intimates his suspicion that it was all "only a feint to cover the expedition to Egypt, which was then preparing." He also states that the British descent on Ostend, where some two thousand of them were made prisoners, "was in search of the gun-boats, and to cut the dykes, to prevent their being assembled." This he was told by Vanhuile, of Bruges, who heard it from the British officers.
After the failure of his attempt to return to America with the Monroes, Paine was for a time the guest of Nicolas de Bonneville, in Paris, and the visit ended in an arrangement for his abode with that family. Bonneville was an editor, thirty-seven years of age, and had been one of the five members of Paine's Republican Club, which placarded Paris with its manifesto after the king's flight in 1791. An enthusiastic devotee of Paine's principles from youth, he had advocated them in his successive journals, Le Tribun du Peuple, Bouche de Fer, and Bien Informé. He had resisted Marat and Robespierre, and suffered imprisonment during the Terror. He spoke English fluently, and was well known in the world of letters by some striking poems, also by his translation into French of German tales, and parts of Shakespeare. He had set up a printing office at No. 4 Rue du Théâtre-Français, where he published liberal pamphlets, also his Bien Informé. Then, in 1794, he printed in French the "Age of Reason." He also published, and probably translated into French, Paine's letter to the now exiled Camille Jordan,—"Lettre de Thomas Paine, sur les Cultes." Paine, unable to converse in French, found with the Bonnevilles a home he needed. M. and Madame Bonneville had been married three years, and their second child had been named after Thomas Paine, who stood as his godfather. Paine, as we learn from Rickman, who knew the Bonnevilles, paid board, but no doubt he aided Bonneville more by his pen.
With public affairs, either in France or America, Paine now mingled but little. The election of John Adams to the presidency he heard of with dismay. He wrote to Jefferson that since he was not president, he was glad he had accepted the vice-presidency, "for John Adams has such a talent for blundering and offending, it will be necessary to keep an eye over him." Finding, by the abandonment of a descent on. England for one on Egypt, that Napoleon was by no means his ideal missionary of republicanism, he withdrew into his little study, and now remained so quiet that some English papers announced his arrival and cool reception in America. He was, however, fairly bored with visitors from all parts of the world, curious to see the one international republican left. It became necessary for Madame Bonneville, armed with polite prevarications, to defend him from such sight-seers. For what with his visits to and from the Barlows, the Smiths, and his friends of the Directory, Paine had too little time for the inventions in which he was again absorbed,—his "Saints." Among his intimate friends at this time was Robert Fulton, then residing in Paris. Paine's extensive studies of the steam-engine, and his early discovery, of its adaptability to navigation, had caused Rumsey to seek him in England, and Fitch to consult him both in America and Paris. Paine's connection with the invention of the steamboat was recognized by Fulton, as indeed by all of his scientific contemporaries.* To Fulton he freely gave his ideas, and may perhaps have had some hope that the steamboat might prove a missionary of international republicanism, though Napoleon had failed.
* Sir Richard Phillips says: "In 1778 Thomas Paine proposed,
in America, this application of steam." ("Million of Facts,"
p. 776.) As Sir Richard assisted Fulton in his experiments
on the Thames, he probably heard from him the fact about
Paine, though, indeed, in the controversy between Rumsey and
Fitch, Paine's priority to both was conceded. In America,
however, the priority really belonged to the eminent
mechanician William Henry, of Lancaster, Pa. When Fitch
visited Henry, in 1785, he was told by him that he was not
the first to devise steam-navigation; that he himself had
thought of it in 1776, and mentioned it to Andrew Ellicott;
and that Thomas Paine, while a guest at his house in 1778,
had spoken to him on the subject I am indebted to Mr. John
W. Jordan, of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, for
notes from the papers of Henry, his ancestor, showing that
Paine's scheme was formed without knowledge of others, and
that it contemplated a turbine application of steam to a
wheel. Both he and Henry, as they had not published their
plans, agreed to leave Fitch the whole credit. Fitch
publicly expressed his gratitude to Paine. Thurston adds
that Paine, in 1788, proposed that Congress should adopt the
whole matter for the national benefit. ("History of the
Growth of the Steam Engine," pp. 252, 253.)
It will not be forgotten that in the same year in which Paine startled William Henry with a plan for steam-navigation, namely in 1778, he wrote his sublime sentence about the "Religion of Humanity." The steamships, which Emerson described as enormous shuttles weaving the races of men into the woof of humanity, have at length rendered possible that universal human religion which Paine foresaw. In that old Lancaster mansion of the Henrys, which still stands, Paine left his spectacles, now in our National Museum; they are strong and far-seeing; through them looked eyes held by visions that the world is still steadily following. One cannot suppress some transcendental sentiment in view of the mystical harmony of this man's inventions for human welfare,—mechanical, political, religious. Of his gunpowder motor, mention has already been made (i., p. 240). On this he was engaged about the time that he was answering Bishop Watson's book on the "Age of Reason." The two occupations are related. He could not believe, he said, that the qualities of gunpowder—the small and light grain with maximum of force—were meant only for murder, and his faith in the divine humanity is in the sentence. To supersede destroying gunpowder with beneficent gunpowder, and to supersede the god of battles with the God of Love, were kindred aims in Paine's heart Through the fiery furnaces of his time he had come forth with every part of his being welded and beaten and shaped together for this Human Service. Patriotism, in the conventional sense, race-pride, sectarianism, partizanship, had been burnt out of his nature. The universe could not have wrung from his tongue approval of a wrong because it was done by his own country.