The Life Of Thomas Paine Volume II Part 9

"DEFORGUES."

* "etats Unis," vol. xl., Doc. 54. Endorsed: "Received the 18th of same [Pluviose, i. e., Feb. 16th]. To declare reception and to tell him that the Minister will take the necessary steps." The French Minister's reply is Doc. 01 of the same volume.

The opening a.s.sertion of the French Minister's note reveals the collusion. Careful examination of the American Minister's letter, to find where he "reclaims the liberty of Thomas Payne as an American citizen," forces me to the conclusion that the Frenchman only discovered such reclamation there by the a.s.sistance of Morris.

The American Minister distinctly declares Paine to be a French citizen, and disclaims official recognition of his conduct as "_pas de mon ressort_."

It will be borne in mind that this French Minister is the same Deforgues who had confided to Morris his longing to succeed Genet in America, and to whom Morris had whispered his design against Paine. Morris resided at Sainport, twenty-seven miles away, but his note is written in Paris.

Four days elapse before the reply. Consultation is further proved by the French Minister's speaking of Paine as "occupying a place in the Legislative Corps." No uninspired Frenchman could have so described the Convention, any more than an American would have described the Convention of 1787 as "Congress." Deforgues' phrase is calculated for Philadelphia, where it might be supposed that the recently adopted Const.i.tution had been followed by the organization of a legislature, whose members must of course take an oath of allegiance, which the Convention had not required.* Deforgues also makes bold to declare--as far away as Philadelphia--that Paine is a French citizen, though he was excluded from the Convention and imprisoned; because he was a "foreigner."

* Deforgues' phrase "laws of the Republic" is also a deception. The Const.i.tution had been totally suspended by the Convention; no government or law had been or ever was established under or by it. There was as yet no Republic, and only revolutionary or martial laws.

The extreme ingenuity of the letter was certainly not original with this Frenchman. The American Minister, in response to his note declaring Paine a French citizen, and disclaiming jurisdiction over him, returns to Sainport with his official opiate for Paine's friends in America and Paris--a certificate that he has "reclaimed the liberty of Thomas Paine as an American citizen." The alleged reclamation suppressed, the certificate sent to Secretary Jefferson and to Paine, the American Minister is credited with having done his duty. In Washington's Cabinet, where the technicalities of citizenship had become of paramount importance, especially as regarded France, Deforgues' claim that Paine was not an American must be accepted--Morris consenting--as final.

It may be wondered that Morris should venture on so dangerous a game.

But he had secured himself in anything he might choose to do. So soon as he discovered, in the previous summer, that he was not to be removed, and had fresh thunderbolts to wield, he veiled himself from the inspection of Jefferson. This he did in a letter of September 22, 1793.

In the quasi-casual way characteristic of him when he is particularly deep, Morris then wrote: "_By the bye, I shall cease to send you copies of my various applications in particular cases, for they will cost you more in postage than they are worth_." I put in italics this sentence, as one which merits memorable record in the annals of diplomacy.

The French Foreign Office being secret as the grave, Jefferson facile, and Washington confiding, there was no danger that Morris' letter to De-forgues would ever appear. Although the letter of Deforgues,--his certificate that Morris had reclaimed Paine as an American,--was a little longer than the pretended reclamation, postal economy did not prevent the American Minister from sending _that_, but his own was never sent to his government, and to this day is unknown to its archives.

It cannot be denied that Morris' letter to De-forgues is masterly in its way. He asks the Minister to give him such reasons for Paine's detention as may not be known to him (Morris), there being no such reasons. He sets at rest any timidity the Frenchman might have, lest Morris should be ensnaring him also, by begging--not demanding--such knowledge as he may communicate to his government. Philadelphia is at a safe distance in time and s.p.a.ce. Deforgues is complacent enough, Morris being at hand, to describe it as a "demand," and to promise speedy action on the matter--which was then straightway buried, for a century's slumber.

Paine was no doubt right in his subsequent belief that Morris was alarmed at his intention of returning to America. Should Paine ever reach Jefferson and his adherents, Gouverneur Morris must instantly lose a position which, sustained by Washington, made him a power throughout Europe. Moreover, there was a Nemesis lurking near him. The revolutionists, aware of his relations with their enemies, were only withheld from laying hands on him by awe of Washington and anxiety about the alliance. The moment of his repudiation by his government would have been a perilous one. It so proved, indeed, when Monroe supplanted him.

For the present, however, he is powerful. As the French Executive could have no interest merely to keep Paine, for six months, without suggestion of trial, it is difficult to imagine any reason, save the wish of Morris, why he was not allowed to depart with the Americans, in accordance with their pet.i.tion.

Thus Thomas Paine, recognized by every American statesman and by Congress as a founder of their Republic, found himself a prisoner, and a man without a country. Outlawed by the rulers of his native land--though the people bore his defender, Erskine, from the court on their shoulders --imprisoned by France as a foreigner, disowned by America as a foreigner, and prevented by its Minister from returning to the country whose President had declared his services to it pre-eminent!

Never dreaming that his situation was the work of Morris, Paine (February 24th) appealed to him for help.

"I received your letter enclosing a copy of a letter from the Minister of foreign affairs. You must not leave me in the situation in which this letter places me. You know I do not deserve it, and you see the unpleasant situation in which I am thrown. I have made an essay in answer to the Minister's letter, which I wish you to make ground of a reply to him. They have nothing against me--except that they do not choose I should be in a state of freedom to write my mind freely upon things I have seen. Though you and I are not on terms of the best harmony, I apply to you as the Minister of America, and you may add to that service whatever you think my integrity deserves. At any rate I expect you to make Congress acquainted with my situation, and to send to them copies of the letters that have pa.s.sed on the subject. A reply to the Minister's letter is absolutely necessary, were it only to continue the reclamation. Otherwise your silence will be a sort of consent to his observations."

Supposing, from the French Minister's opening a.s.sertion, that a reclamation had really been made, Paine's simplicity led him into a trap. He sent his argument to be used by the Minister in an answer of his own, so that Minister was able to do as he pleased with it, the result being that it was buried among his private papers, to be partly brought to light by Jared Sparks, who is candid enough to remark on the Minister's indifference and the force of Paine's argument. Not a word to Congress was ever said on the subject.

Jefferson, without the knowledge or expectation of Morris, had resigned the State Secretaryship at the close of 1793. Morris' letter of March 6th reached the hands of Edmund Randolph, Jefferson's successor, late in June. On June 25th Randolph writes Washington, at Mount Vernon, that he has received a letter from Morris, of March 6th, saying "that he has demanded Paine as an American citizen, but that the Minister holds him to be amenable to the French laws." Randolph was a just man and an exact lawyer; it is certain that if he had received a copy of the fict.i.tious "reclamation" the imprisonment would have been curtailed. Under the false information before him, nothing could be done but await the statement of the causes of Paine's detention, which Deforgues would "lose no time" in transmitting. It was impossible to deny, without further knowledge, the rights over Paine apparently claimed by the French government.

And what could be done by the Americans in Paris, whom Paine alone had befriended? Joel Barlow, who had best opportunities of knowing the facts, says: "He [Paine] was always charitable to the poor beyond his means, a sure friend and protector to all Americans in distress that he found in foreign countries; and he had frequent occasions to exert his influence in protecting them during the Revolution in France." They were grateful and deeply moved, these Americans, but thoroughly deceived about the situation. Told that they must await the action of a distant government, which itself was waiting for action in Paris, alarmed by the American Minister's hints of danger that might ensue on any misstep or agitation, a.s.sured that he was proceeding with the case, forbidden to communicate with Paine, they were reduced to helplessness. Meanwhile, between silent America and these Americans, all so cunningly disabled, stood the remorseless French Committee, ready to strike or to release in obedience to any sign from the alienated ally, to soothe whom no sacrifice would be too great. Genet had been demanded for the altar of sacred Alliance, but (to Morris' regret) refused by the American government. The Revolution would have preferred Morris as a victim, but was quite ready to offer Paine.

Six or seven months elapsed without bringing from President or Cabinet a word of sympathy for Paine. But they brought increasing indications that America was in treaty with England, and Washington disaffected towards France. Under these circ.u.mstances Robespierre resolved on the accusation and trial of Paine. It does not necessarily follow that Paine would have been condemned; but there were some who did not mean that he should escape, among whom Robespierre may or may not have been included. The probabilities, to my mind, are against that theory. Robespierre having ceased to attend the Committee of Public Safety when the order issued for Paine's death.

CHAPTER VIII. SICK AND IN PRISON

It was a strange world into which misfortune had introduced Paine. There was in prison a select and rather philosophical society, mainly persons of refinement, more or less released from conventional habit by the strange conditions under which they found themselves. There were gentlemen and ladies, no attempt being made to separate them until some scandal was reported. The Luxembourg was a special prison for the French n.o.bility and the English, who had a good opportunity for cultivating democratic ideas. The gaoler, Benoit, was good-natured, and cherished his unwilling guests as his children, according to a witness.

Paine might even have been happy there but for the ever recurring tragedies--the cries of those led forth to death. He was now and then in strange juxtapositions. One day Deforgues came to join him, he who had conspired with Morris. Instead of receiving for his crime diplomatic security in America he found himself beside his victim. Perhaps if Deforgues and Paine had known each other's language a confession might have pa.s.sed There were horrors on horrors. Paine's old friend, Herault de Sech.e.l.les, was imprisoned for having humanely concealed in his house a poor officer who was hunted by the police; he parted from Paine for the scaffold. So also he parted from the brilliant Camille Desmoulins, and the fine dreamer, Anacharsis Clootz. One day came Danton, who, taking Paine's hand, said: "That which you did for the happiness and liberty of your country, I tried in vain to do for mine. I have been less fortunate, but not less innocent. They will send me to the scaffold; very well, my friends, I shall go gaily." Even so did Danton meet his doom.*

All of the English prisoners became Paine's friends. Among these was General O'Hara,--that same general who had fired the American heart at Yorktown by offering the surrendered sword of Cornwallis to Rochambeau instead of Washington. O'Hara's captured suite included two physicians--Bond and Graham--who attended Paine during an illness, as he gratefully records. What money Paine had when arrested does not appear to have been taken from him, and he was able to a.s.sist General O'Hara with 200 to return to his country; though by this and similar charities he was left without means when his own unexpected deliverance came.**

The first part of "The Age of Reason" was sent out with final revision at the close of January.

* "Memoires sur les prisons," t. ii., p. 153.

** Among the anecdotes told of O'Hara in prison, one is related of an argument he held with a Frenchman, on the relative degrees of liberty in England and France. "In England," he said, "we are perfectly free to write and print, George is a good King; but you--why you are not even Permitted to write, Robespierre is a tiger!"

In the second edition appeared the following inscription:

"TO MY FELLOW CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.--I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.--Your affectionate friend and fellow citizen,

"Thomas Paine."

This dedication is dated, "Luxembourg (Paris), 8th Pluviose, Second year of the French Republic, one and indivisible. January 27, O. S. 1794."

Paine now addressed himself to the second part of "The Age of Reason,"

concerning which the following anecdote is told in the ma.n.u.script memoranda of Thomas Rickman:

"Paine, while in the Luxembourg prison and expecting to die hourly, read to Mr. Bond (surgeon of Brighton, from whom this anecdote came) parts of his _Age of Reason_; and every night, when Mr. Bond left him, to be separately locked up, and expecting not to see Paine alive in the morning, he [Paine] always expressed his firm belief in the principles of that book, and begged Mr. Bond should tell the world such were his dying sentiments. Paine further said, if he lived he should further prosecute the work and print it. Bond added, Paine was the most conscientious man he ever knew."

In after years, when Paine was undergoing persecution for "infidelity,"

he reminded the zealots that they would have to "accuse Providence of infidelity," for having "protected him in all his dangers." Incidentally he gives reminiscences of his imprisonment.

"I was one of the nine members that composed the first Committee of Const.i.tution. Six of them have been destroyed. Sieyes and myself have survived--he by bending with the times, and I by not bending. The other survivor [Barrere] joined Robespierre; he was seized and imprisoned in his turn, and sentenced to transportation. He has since apologized to me for having signed the warrant, by saying he felt himself in danger and was obliged to do it. Herault Sech.e.l.les, an acquaintance of Mr.

Jefferson, and a good patriot, was my _suppleant_ as member of the Committee of Const.i.tution.... He was imprisoned in the Luxembourg with me, was taken to the tribunal and guillotined, and I, his princ.i.p.al, left. There were two foreigners in the Convention, Anacharsis Clootz and myself. We were both put out of the Convention by the same vote, arrested by the same order, and carried to prison together the same night. He was taken to the guillotine, and I was again left.... Joseph Lebon, one of the vilest characters that ever existed, and who made the streets of Arras run with blood, was my _suppleant_ as member of the Convention for the Pas de Calais. When I was put out of the Convention he came and took my place. When I was liberated from prison and voted again into the Convention, he was sent to the same prison and took my place there, and he was sent to the guillotine instead of me. He supplied my place all the way through.

"One hundred and sixty-eight persons were taken out of the Luxembourg in one night, and a hundred and sixty of them guillotined next day, of which I knew I was to be one; and the manner I escaped that fate is curious, and has all the appearance of accident. The room in which I lodged was on the ground floor, and one of a long range of rooms under a gallery, and the door of it opened outward and flat against the wall; so that when it was open the inside of the door appeared outward, and the contrary when it was shut. I had three comrades, fellow prisoners with me, Joseph Vanhuile of Bruges, since president of the munic.i.p.ality of that town, Michael and Robbins Bastini of Louvain. When persons by scores and by hundreds were to be taken out of the prison for the guillotine it was always done in the night, and those who performed that office had a private mark or signal by which they knew what rooms to go to, and what number to take. We, as I have-said, were four, and the door of our room was marked, un.o.bserved by us, with that number in chalk; but it happened, if happening is the proper word, that the mark was put on when the door was open and flat against the wall, and thereby came on the inside when we shut it at night; and the destroying angel pa.s.sed by it."

Paine did not hear of this chalk mark until afterwards. In his letter to Washington he says:

"I had been imprisoned seven months, and the silence of the executive part of the government of America (Mr. Washington) upon the case, and upon every thing respecting me, was explanation enough to Robespierre that he might proceed to extremities. A violent fever which had nearly terminated my existence was, I believe, the circ.u.mstance that preserved it. I was not in a condition to be removed, or to know of what was pa.s.sing, or of what had pa.s.sed, for more than a month. It makes a blank in my remembrance of life. The first thing I was informed of was the fall of Robespierre."

The probabilities are that the prison physician Marhaski, whom Paine mentions with grat.i.tude, was with him when the chalk mark was made, and that there was some connivance in the matter. In the same letter he says:

"From about the middle of March (1794) to the fall of Robespierre, July 29, (9th of Thermidor,) the state of things in the prisons was a continued scene of horror. No man could count upon life for twenty-four hours. To such a pitch of rage and suspicion were Robespierre and his committee arrived, that it seemed as if they feared to leave a man to live. Scarcely a night pa.s.sed in which ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more were not taken out of the prison, carried before a pretended tribunal in the morning, and guillotined before night. One hundred and sixty-nine were taken out of the Luxembourg one night in the month of July, and one hundred and sixty of them guillotined. A list of two hundred more, according to the report in the prison, was preparing a few days before Robespierre fell. In this last list I have good reason to believe I was included."

To this Paine adds the memorandum for his accusation found in Robespierre's note-book. Of course it was natural, especially with the memorandum, to accept the Robespierre mythology of the time without criticism. The ma.s.sacres of July were not due to Robespierre, who during that time was battling with the Committee of Public Safety, at whose hands he fell on the 29th. At the close of June there was an alarm at preparations for an insurrection in Luxembourg prison, which caused a union of the Committee of Public Safety and the police, resulting in indiscriminate slaughter of prisoners.

But Paine was discriminated. Barrere, long after, apologized to him for having signed "the warrant," by saying he felt himself in danger and was obliged to do it Paine accepted the apology, and when Barrere had returned to France, after banishment, Paine introduced him to the English author, Lewis Goldsmith.* As Barrere did not sign the warrant for Paine's imprisonment, it must have been a warrant for his death, or for accusation at a moment when it was equivalent to a death sentence.

Whatever danger Barrere had to fear, so great as to cause him to sacrifice Paine, it was not from Robespierre; else it would not have continued to keep Paine in prison three months after Robespierre's death.

* "Memoires de B. Barrere," t. i., p. 80. Lewis Goldsmith was the author of "Crimes of the Cabinets."

As Robespierre's memorandum was for a "decree of accusation" against Paine, separately, which might not have gone against him, but possibly have dragged to light the conspiracy against him, there would seem to be no ground for connecting that "demand" with the warrant signed by a Committee he did not attend.

Paine had good cause for writing as he did in praise of "Forgetfulness."

During the period in which he was unconscious with fever the horrors of the prison reached their apogee. On June 19th the kindly gaoler, Benoit, was removed and tried; he was acquitted but not restored. His place was given to a cruel fellow named Gayard, who inst.i.tuted a reign of terror in the prison.

There are many evidences that the good Benoit, so warmly remembered by Paine, evaded the rigid police regulations as to communications of prisoners with their friends outside, no doubt with precaution against those of a political character. It is pleasant to record an instance of this which was the means of bringing beautiful rays of light into Paine's cell. Shortly before his arrest an English lady had called on him, at his house in the Faubourg St. Denis, to ask his intervention in behalf of an Englishman of rank who had been arrested. Paine had now, however, fallen from power, and could not render the requested service.

This lady was the last visitor who preceded the officers who arrested him. But while he was in prison there was brought to him a communication, in a lady's handwriting, signed "A little corner of the World." So far as can be gathered, this letter was of a poetical character, perhaps tinged with romance. It was followed by others, all evidently meant to beguile the weary and fearful hours of a prisoner whom she had little expectation of ever meeting again. Paine, by the aid of Benoit, managed to answer his "contemplative correspondent," as he called her, signing, "The Castle in the Air." These letters have never seen the light, but the sweetness of this sympathy did, for many an hour, bring into Paine's _oubliette_ the oblivion of grief described in the letter on "Forgetfulness," sent to the lady after his liberation.

"Memory, like a beauty that is always present to hear herself flattered, is flattered by every one. But the absent and silent G.o.ddess, Forgetfulness, has no votaries, and is never thought of: yet we owe her much. She is the G.o.ddess of ease, though not of pleasure. When the mind is like a room hung with black, and every corner of it crowded with the most horrid images imagination can create, this kind, speechless maid, Forgetfulness, is following us night and day with her opium wand, and gently touching first one and then another, benumbs them into rest, and then glides away with the silence of a departing shadow."