Citizen Tom Paine (32 page)

“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: