by Howard Fast
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:
“It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion; I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and, from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I intend it to be the last offering I shall make to my fellow citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it, could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.
“The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of the priesthood and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest, in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.
“As several of my colleagues, and others of my fellow citizens of France, have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself.
“I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
“I believe the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.
“But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe and my reasons for not believing them.
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”
That way, there was a beginning; he put down what he believed, what he did not believe, and then he labored, day after day, in the old, deserted farmhouse. He was not fashioning a creed; men had done that already, as much by acts as by words. Christ on a cross had fashioned it and so had a rustic boy dying on a village green in New England. So had a thousand and a hundred thousand others. It remained only for him to formulate it and put it in place as the last work in his encyclopedia of revolution.
During those quiet days when he worked on The Age of Reason, he did not go into old Paris very often. Once to seek for a Bible written in English; Bibles there were in plenty, but all in French, and for the life of him he could not lay hands on a King James version. That made it harder for him, having to work on out of his memory, seeking back to all the times in his childhood when he had read certain passages over and over, quoting as he worked, sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. The Bible was necessary, for in writing down a faith that could be accepted by a reasonable man, a gentle man, a good man, he had to tear apart, boldly and ruthlessly, the whole fabric of superstition that had been woven through the ages.
Often he was tempted to send to England for the work he needed, but the passage of even a piece of mail was long and uncertain, and Paine was driven by a deadly sense of urgency. No one, living in or about Paris as the year of 1793 drew to a close, could forget the pall of The Terror. It had lost meaning and reason, and struck about as wildly as a maddened beast. First it had been the right, but now Jacobins of the extreme left joined the procession to the guillotine. What Paine had feared most was coming about, the dictatorship of violence gone amuck.
On one of his trips into Paris, Paine looked up an old acquaintance of his, Joel Barlow, whom he had helped once when Barlow was in legal difficulties with a French court.
“Whatever happens,” Paine said, “I don’t care too much, but I’ve been working on a manuscript that will soon be finished and that means a great deal to me. If they come for me, can I entrust the manuscript to you?”
“Gladly,” Barlow nodded, and then begged Paine to leave for America.
“In good time,” Paine nodded. “When my work in France is over.”
He had finished his book; his credo was down on paper, and he felt a complete and wonderful sense of relief, the feeling of a man washed clean and rested. He had struck a blow at atheism, and he had—or so he believed—given the people of France and of the world a rational creed to sustain them through the years of revolution that he saw ahead. He had proclaimed God in all that man saw, in the perfect symmetry of a leaf, in a rosy sunset, in a million stars cast like a hood in the night, in the earth, in the sea, in all creation. He told them not to look for cheap, tawdry miracles, when they themselves and the world they lived in were the greatest of all miracles.
He told them to believe in God because they and the world they inhabited were the strongest proof of God. God’s work was creation; His bible and proof were creation. It was a blazing, living, signed document, and it required neither superstitions nor horror tales to support it. It was Tom Paine to France, saying, “If you choose atheism now, I, at least, have done my part.”
On one of his short trips to Paris, he had gone to the Convention hall and told the doorkeeper in very bad French, “Deputy Thomas Paine, representing Calais,” and the doorkeeper stared as if he had seen a ghost. And others stared; all over the hall brows raised and necks craned as they turned to look at him.
There was only one of the old radical group of foreign expatriates left in the hall, Anacharsis Clootz, the Prussian, one of the extreme left, a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a socialist before there was socialism, a little mad, a great deal brilliant, unafraid, vehemently outspoken, much like Paine and very much unlike him. Until now, they had worked together occasionally, but not easily; Paine was a republican,
an advocate of democracy; Clootz was the advocate of a social conception, the theory of which hardly existed. He waved at Paine now, and afterwards, leaving the hall, got close to him and called:
“Hello there, my old friend, where have you been?”
“Writing.”
“They all write before they go to the Madam Guillotine. And what nonsense this time?”
“Gods and men.”
Clootz was a militant atheist; he held his stomach now, roaring with laughter and calling after Paine, “We will discuss that, no?”
They were to discuss it soon enough.
His time had about run out; he had desired a reprieve, not out of any great desire to go on living a life that for all practical purposes was over, but because, as so often before, he had something which he felt he must put down on paper. But now that it was done, he went to meet his fate almost eagerly. They would not have to seek him; he was no recluse, and he had never fled from a judgment. Already, he had been too long alone in the big farmhouse; that was not for Paine; for Paine was the feel of his fellow men, their nearness, their voices and their smiles and their good intimacies. So he packed together the few things he had, the finished manuscript, some other papers, a book or two and some shirts and underclothes—not a great deal, but he had never been one for worldly possessions. If a man makes the world his castle, he does not seek to furnish it.
He returned to Paris and White’s Hotel, to raised brows and breath softly drawn in. “Still here, Paine?”
“Still here.”
And such whispered comments as, “Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.”
And behind his back, slick, a finger across a throat—“If he wants to, that’s his own affair.”
He ordered a brandy, he proposed a toast, “To the Republic of France, forever, gentlemen!” And no one knew whether to laugh or to deride.
On Christmas Day, a motion was put forward in the hall to exclude all foreigners from seats in the Convention. There were only two foreigners left, Paine and Clootz, and it was at them that the move was directed. Paine had seen this coming; he knew it when he returned to the city, when he made the toast to the Republic, when he finally went to bed to sleep what might be his last night as a free man. He was not afraid; he wanted it to come quickly; no longer a deputy of France, he wanted the surge of the revolution to overtake him, to devour him if it must.
