Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  In this hellishness, Paine became something more than a man; he became a spirit and a faith; he became consolation and redemption. He knew when to smile—and a smile was the only thing on earth these poor devils could be given. He knew the few words that could help a man go to his death; he knew a phrase to console a mother. He was tireless, without fear, without hesitation. Gaunt, his health failing, nevertheless the mere sight of his big, angular figure entering a room was enough to cheer the occupants. “It is Monsieur Paine—come in, come in.” He had a vast fund of stories, the drawling, American frontier jokes, which translated into his very bad French made almost no sense at all, but which were funny and pointless enough to send the poor devils who heard them into aching laughter. And he knew when to call up mirth; he knew when to be silent, when his mere presence was enough, when a word was enough.

  And man after man, woman after woman, going to meet their death, said, “Send for Citizen Paine.”

  He lay in his bare room; he waxed hot and cold with fever; time lost meaning for him and disappeared. The fever came and receded, like undulating waves of fire, and he lived in a nightmarish world, populated by saints and devils. Vaguely he sensed that men were entering and leaving; screams sometimes made him wonder where he was, and in a moment of clarity, he heard a man say:

  “This wretch is dying.”

  And it mattered little or not at all, for the fever always returned, burning him, chilling him, burning him again.

  Then, after a long, long time, sanity returned. He asked what month it was.

  “July—”

  And he counted, “January, February, March—”

  “I am still in the Luxembourg?”

  “Quite true, citizen, but matters have changed. Robespierre is dead. St. Just is dead. Take heart, citizen. The Terror is over.”

  “So The Terror is over,” Paine sighed, and that night he slept without dreams.

  It is difficult to regain one’s strength in prison, even if one does not live in hourly fear of death. Paine, looking in a glass again, found a gray-haired stranger confronting him, a sunken face that was etched all over with lines and wrinkles. It made him smile, so much a stranger was the image, and the smile that the mirror returned him was hollow and mocking.

  The beast, Guiard, had passed on with the downfall of Robespierre’s government, and Arden, the new jailer, allowed the prisoners the freedom of the courtyard. Paine could walk again in the blessed sunlight; it was summer, and he could smell the flowers and watch the strollers in the gardens and mark the little clouds as they scudded overhead. The whole air of the Luxembourg had changed; it was still a prison, but it was not a death house. People left, again by the tens and twenties, but now they passed through the gates to freedom.

  For the time being, Paine had little to do but to think—to contemplate the events of the past six months, the strange silence which had abandoned him during that time when the Luxembourg was a place of horror. Why had Morris made no effort to secure his freedom? he asked himself. Why had the American nation remained completely passive? Did it mean nothing to George Washington that Paine was in prison, perhaps to be guillotined any day? The whole attitude of Washington was incomprehensible. Why had he never really expressed his thanks to Paine for inscribing to him The Rights of Man? Had he forgotten that the country he presided over now was born out of revolution?

  During the long days Paine spent recuperating from his sickness he brooded long and often over what had happened to America during these past years. Most difficult of all was to believe ill of that man who had seemed to him, for so many years, better and truer than any other man he had known, George Washington.

  And then there was a ray of hope. Gouverneur Morris was no longer minister to France; James Monroe, a Jeffersonian democrat, had replaced him. Eagerly, Paine waited for Monroe’s arrival, and once he was installed, sent him a long memorial, pleading his case and begging Monroe to make some effort to obtain his freedom. Monroe answered with a cheerful and hopeful reply, that he would work on the case and that Paine could expect liberation soon.

  Yet it didn’t come; the summer was over and another winter began, and almost all the other prisoners who had been with Paine in the Luxembourg had been freed; but he remained. It was fever again, sores developing in his side, his big, strong body finally crumbling under ten long months of imprisonment. His hand barely able to hold a pen, he wrote to Monroe again.

  Barlow came to see him, and looking at the American with dulled eyes, Paine said barely a word.

  “Paine?”

  “It was never the dying I minded,” Paine whispered. “But to have it drawn out like this; is more than I can bear.”

  Then Monroe wrote to the Committee of General Security, “The services which he [Paine] rendered them [the people of America] in their struggle for liberty have made an impression, of gratitude which will never be erased, whilst they continue to merit the character of a just and generous people. He is now in prison, languishing under a disease, and which must be increased by his confinement. Permit me, then, to call your attention to his situation, and to require that you will hasten his trial in case there be any charge against him, and if there be none, you will cause him to be set at liberty.”

  And it was done; in November, 1794, Tom Paine was released from Luxembourg Palace, not the man who had entered, but one sick and old and gray-haired.

  14

  NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  PAINE had been living with the Monroes, gaining back his strength so slowly that again and again he despaired of ever being more than an invalid. No one expected him to live; they were so certain he would die that already news of his death had been sent across the ocean to America.

  Yet he did not die. His strong, leathery body could absorb a fearful amount of punishment, and presently he was well enough to ask for the manuscript of The Age of Reason.

  He read it through with delight; in parts, it was lacking, but in others it was very good, fiery, a ringing memory of his old self. He would have to add to it, but meanwhile he would have this section published. Let the atheists read it and find something worth believing in.

  Meanwhile his thoughts turned increasingly toward America. There was not much, if anything, left for him in France; the revolution had imprisoned him, cast him out, departed from the principles he preached. In America it was different; he was not too old to fight, and back in that land he so loved he would once more fight for liberty against the strange, dark reaction that had set in with the Washington administration. Now it was winter, but when spring came again, he would be strong enough to travel.

  And then the National Convention recalled him, gave him back his seat, and made him once more a deputy of France. Monroe was delighted. “You see, Paine,” he said, “that this vindicates you—this is the final confession of injustice. Once again as Citizen Paine, as leader of liberal democrats throughout the world, you can take your seat in the representative chamber of Republican France.”

  But for Paine, there was no triumph; he was almost frightened. The ten months in prison had done something to him, not only deprived him of bodily strength but taken away a certain resiliency of mind. Another Terror, he could not endure; another shattering of all he worked for would be worse than death.

  He sat down and wrote to the Assembly:

  “My intention is to accept the invitation of the Assembly. For I desire that it be known to the universe that, although I have been the victim of injustice, I do not attribute my sufferings to those who had no part in them, and that I am far from using reprisals towards even those who are the authors of them. But, as it is necessary that I return to America next spring, I desire to consult you on the situation in which I find myself, in order that my acceptation of returning to the Convention may not deprive me of the right to return to America.”

  But it was of that very right that they deprived him. Later, Monroe desired to send Paine to America with certain important papers. The Committee of Public Safety answer
ed that Paine could not be spared.

  So he stayed on at the Convention, old, feeble, a gray-haired man who sometimes rose and said a few words no one listened to. He felt trapped and helpless.

  And then The Age of Reason was published in England and America.

  Youth had almost returned to him as he worked alongside the French publisher, sought with him for a good English typesetter, and breathed once again that delicious smell of wet printer’s ink, that smell which evoked every dear and splendid memory he knew.

  It was his confession of faith, his last work, his tribute to God and to good men. It was his stroke against atheism; it was his fervent faith in a deity that was good and merciful, and in man’s ability to approach that deity without compulsion and superstition. And then it was published, a batch of copies sent to England, another batch to America, and then the ax fell.

  Formerly, Satan had been one; now he became two, himself and Tom Paine. Every religious denomination joined together to attack this devil who had thrown doubt on all organized religion. Even in France, the repercussions jolted and tossed the tired old warrior. There was no understanding, no sympathy, nothing but abuse, abuse, and abuse. The servants of God conceived a vocabulary of foul names to apply to Paine, such adjectives as the world had not seen before, and as a summation it was decided that since the creation there had been no human being more wicked and more vile than Paine. To most of this, Paine did not reply; if he were wrong, it would have been different; if he were wrong they would have gone about proving him wrong and not showered him with filth. Convinced that he was right, he saw no need to go on adding to his arguments.

  Yet now and again, he was driven to an answer, as for instance when Wakefield, the English Unitarian, attacked him. To him Paine wrote:

  “When you have done as much service to the world by your writings, and suffered as much for them, as I have done, you will be better entitled to dictate.…”

  He was terribly tired; sick again, he heard of the reaction in America; it was not all abuse there, as in England; some stood up for his point of view; there were still old comrades of his left, old revolutionists who had not forgotten how to think—and they were buying many copies of his book.

  To Monroe, he said wearily, “I want to go home, I am so tired.” Now there was a place called home; the world was his village, but now he kept thinking of the green hills and valleys of America. He was an old man in a strange land. He was the most hated—and perhaps by a few the most loved—man in all the world. For twenty years his broad shoulders had taken abuse; they were tired now.

  Monroe said, “I wonder whether publication of The Age of Reason was wise, Paine. In America—”

  “When have I been wise?” Paine cried. “Was it wise to throw my fortune with a pack of farmers the world knew defeated before ever they began to fight? Was it wise for me to cry out for independence before any of your great men at home had dared to conceive the notion? Was it wise for me to give a revolutionary credo to England and then have to flee for my life? Was it wise for me to spend ten months under the shadow of the guillotine? I have been many things, but never prudent, never wise. That’s for heroes and great men, not for a staymaker!”

  The portrait of Paine, drawn with horns, hung on the wall of many an English home. Taverns displayed beer mugs with Paine’s picture, and underneath it, “Drink with the devil.” In a hundred churches on a hundred Sundays sermons were preached on Tom Paine, apostate. In London, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Sheffield, piles of Paine’s books were burned, while crowds danced around the fires, screaming:

  “Paine, Paine, damned be his name,

  Damned be his fame and lasting his shame,

  God damn Paine! God damn Paine!”

  Feverish again, he lay and brooded and thought he was going to die. He didn’t care. He turned over in his mind, one by one, all the horrors he had suffered during his imprisonment, and his resentment came to center upon a single man, George Washington.

  There were others, Morris and Hamilton and the whole counter-revolutionary crowd, but what other had he worshiped the way he worshiped George Washington? He remembered how Washington, the aristocrat, the wealthiest man in America, had taken the hand of Paine, the nobody. He remembered how Washington, at Valley Forge, had begged him to go and plead his case before Congress. He remembered that he, Paine, had written, “The names of Washington and Fabius will run parallel to eternity.”

  So it was not the others who mattered, but George Washington; the others had not betrayed him, he had no claim on them. Washington it was who sent the contemptuous Morris as ambassador to Republican France; Washington had sent Jay to England to smear the honor of America; Washington had ignored The Rights of Man, dedicated to him, the key to the Bastille, presented to him; Washington had turned his back on the people and on democracy.

  Sick as he was, tired as he was, he could not seek for a true perspective. He did not know what Washington had been told of him, nor did he care, but desired only to lash out at this man who, as Paine saw it, had betrayed both a friend and a cause. And believing he was going to die, he put into a letter his rage against a man whom he had once loved more than any other on earth.

  Monroe begged him not to send it. “It will accomplish nothing,” Monroe pleaded. “Believe me, it will accomplish nothing and gain for you only more enemies. How many years is it since you left America? Washington is only a man, and men forget.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Paine said.

  For a time he held the letter, then he sent it, to be made public.

  Paine continued to attend the Convention as a delegate from Calais. When the Thermidorians put down the popular uprising by force of arms and denied the people a voice in the new government, demanding property qualifications for the right to vote, a feeble old man stood up in the Convention and, faced them. Even now Paine could vividly recall the torture of his abscessed side as he stood there in front of rank after rank of hostile faces. No screaming gallery with food wrapped in paper, eating as they applauded or hissed, no fervent radicals demanding death for those who opposed the people’s will, but rather well-fed, stolid legislators who made a good thing out of the decadent remains of what had once been a movement for the freedom of man.

  They looked at Paine and they whispered to each other, “Has the old fool no sense at all? Isn’t ten months in the Luxembourg enough? Or must we send him back there for good?”

  “What is he up to now?”

  “Franchise.”

  “Yes, he wants them to vote. Let every blessed beggar vote, and the judgment day will come.”

  “Make a move to block it.”

  Someone else said wearily, “Let him speak. No one is listening.”

  And he spoke of franchise, of the right of every human being to vote. He had a knack of making enemies; he had a knack of always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time; he had a knack of making people hate Paine as they had never hated anyone else. Now amid the hundred voices crying out against him, one said:

  “Is it difficult to tolerate that man who has never manifested the least degree of intolerance to anyone?”

  No, he had never lost faith; he had not abandoned democracy, it had abandoned him—the Thermidors, then the Directory, the whole gradual and complete collapse of the revolution.

  He began to run down like a watch; he stopped functioning in the only way he was fitted to function, as a revolutionist. Nothing but that could have made him so feeble and purposeless, not the hatred stirred up by The Age of Reason, not his sickness, not the silence of his old comrades in America, but simply the fact that he had ceased to fulfill his purpose.

  He wrote a little; he was a writer and until he died, he would fumble with a pen. He remembered old Ben Franklin who had been a philosopher and a scientist until the day of his death, and Paine thought he too would dabble with philosophy and science, little machines, models, gadgets that were ingenious enough but meant nothing more than the chattering of a voice that had onc
e roared out firm and strong, and since the voice could not be completely silenced it took these small, futile directions.

  And thereby, he went to pieces. Forgotten—a new age was dawning, the nineteenth century. Had a fool once said, “Give me seven years and I will write a Common Sense for every nation in Europe”? That too was forgotten. The wave which he started, the upsurge of the common man, would never disappear, but it would undulate, sinking now into obscurity, coming up again in a spurt of fresh power. For him, for Thomas Paine, revolutionist, that was no consolation; he had failed, and the powers of darkness were rising.

  He, who had never been meticulous about his appearance, now completely neglected it. He shaved once a week, sometimes less often. He wore dirty linen and old felt slippers out of which his toes poked forlornly. He shuffled back and forth in the confines of his littered chamber, and sometimes he would stand, head poised, as if trying to recall something he had recently forgotten.

  What had he forgotten? That the bells were ringing at Lexington?

  Liquor was an old friend; it was a friend when other friends were gone. Let the teetotalers cry out against it, his body was his own; when it was good and strong and vigorous, he had used it unsparingly and not for himself; now it was old and worn out and sick, and if he drank to ease the pain and the loneliness, that was his business and no one else’s.

  He still had a friend or two among the plain Parisians; good people, the French, simple people, enduring people—civilized people. They understood such things; a man is a man, not a god, and when they saw Paine coming down the street, dirty, shuffling, they did not laugh or hoot at him, but gently passed the time of the day with one who had once been great.

  “A good day, Citizen Paine.”

  They didn’t forget so easily. If there were five heads outside the wineshop, bent over one of the small, smudged Paris newspapers, trying to unravel the involved politics of Talleyrand, and Citizen Paine came along, they deferred to him.

  “A good day, citizen—this man Talleyrand.”