Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  “I know him, only too well,” Paine said.

  There was nothing incongruous to them in this poor creature having been not so long ago the intimate of Talleyrand.

  “He came to me for advice,” Paine said. “I don’t like him.”

  Nothing incongruous in that either; a king became a beggar and a beggar a dictator. Hadn’t they lived through those times and didn’t they know the broad loops the wheel of fortune made?

  In the wineshop, the shopkeeper was the soul of quiet courtesy. He had sold to Danton, to Condorcet, and now he was selling to Citizen Paine. He saw glories that were not so long ago, and he tried not to see a dirty old man.

  “The best, of course,” he nodded, and chopped a franc he could ill afford from the price.

  In that way, Citizen Thomas Paine passed out of the public life of France.

  Living with the Bonnevilles was an old man called Paine, a rather ineffectual old man who puttered about at one thing and another—and sometimes would pause in the midst of what he was doing, with an absent seeking expression on his lined face. He was given to brief lapses of memory, and he was none too tidy. Sometimes out and rambling about Paris, he would come home with a bottle of brandy wrapped in newspaper under his arm, and closing his door behind him would drink half of it in an hour. Then, drunk, he would sometimes make a nuisance of himself—all of which the Bonnevilles put up with very patiently. When asked why by a curious neighbor, they would answer, very simply:

  “You see, he is a great man, one of the greatest men this world has ever known. But the world is a quick place, and you have to scurry to keep up with it. He is too old to scurry about like a hare, and therefore the world has forgotten him. But we have not forgotten him.”

  Nicholas de Bonneville was a newspaper editor, a liberal, and a republican. His wife was a good-natured young woman who believed ardently in whatever her husband believed in. When he told her of Tom Paine’s greatness, she nodded and agreed. She came of country folk, and had the peasant’s tolerance for the whims of the aged, and because of that and because of what her husband told her, she put up with this untidy old man whose room was a litter of newspapers, books, little mechanical contrivances, empty brandy bottles, and numerous manuscripts, some of which occasionally appeared in her husband’s newspaper.

  One morning, in the fall of 1797, a short, pudgy stranger appeared at the Bonnevilles’ front door and asked for Citizen Thomas Paine. At first Madame Bonneville stared at him suspiciously, then, recognizing him, she broke into excited welcome, ushered him into her parlor, offered him a glass of wine which he refused, blundered here and there and everywhere in her nervousness, and finally clattered upstairs to call Citizen Paine.

  Paine, laboriously working at a manuscript, raised his brows as she burst in and asked whether or not the house was burning down. Ignoring this bit of facetiousness on the part of her lodger, she said breathlessly:

  “Monsieur, Bonaparte is downstairs!”

  “Who?”

  “Listen to me, listen very carefully, Monsieur. Napoleon Bonaparte is sitting downstairs in my parlor at this very moment, waiting to speak with Citizen Thomas Paine. Do you understand me? He has come here, alone, for no other purpose than to speak with Citizen Thomas Paine!”

  “Of course, I understand you,” Paine growled. “Stop shouting; go downstairs and tell him to go away.”

  “What? Monsieur, surely you misunderstand me. I said—”

  “I know what you said. Go down and tell him I have no time for brigands and evil men.”

  “No, no, no, no,” Madame Bonneville sighed. “No, no, this you cannot do here under my roof. I have put up with many things, with dirt and drunkenness and noisiness, but I will not see a great general of France who has come to my house turned away.”

  “I pay my rent and keep,” Paine muttered.

  “No, Monsieur, it is not a question of rent, not if you paid double what you do. You will see Bonaparte or—”

  “Very well, I will see him,” Paine snorted. “Bring him up here.”

  “Here? In this?”

  “And what’s wrong with this? I live here, don’t I?”

  “No, no, no, no, Monsieur—you will come down to my parlor.”

  Paine shrugged. “Then down to your parlor,” he agreed, and followed her downstairs. As they came into the parlor, Bonaparte rose and bowed, and Paine was struck immediately with the insignificance of the man, so short, so pudgy in body yet so lean in face, a shopkeeper possibly, but not the great general, not the warrior, not the diabolical genius who was shredding away the last remnants of the French Republic and the hopes and prayers of all men of good will.

  “How sad it is,” the old man thought, “that the great heroes and great villains of the world do not fulfill themselves physically!”

  “You are Citizen Paine,” Napoleon said. “I am Bonaparte—I have looked forward to this day, eagerly, hopefully. It is not often given us to meet the great ones of the ages. They pass away, and we must content ourselves with the legends. But I stand face to face with the greatest of all legends—Citizen Paine!”

  That was not what Paine had expected; that broke through his armor, his defense, his calculated hatred for a man who represented all that he deemed evil. He was old; he was lonely; he was tired of being vilified; and this was a tribute.

  He said, “Thank you, General.”

  “Not General, Citizen Bonaparte to Citizen Paine. My friend, sit down, if it pleases you.” He had a way of command, even in things he asked, such as the simple matter of courtesy. Paine sank into a chair, but Napoleon paced back and forth, his head forward, his hands clenched behind him in a gesture that was already part of him.

  “Citizen Paine,” Napoleon said, “whatever you have thought of me, here is what I have been thinking of you—that a statue of gold should be erected to you in every city on the face of this earth, that your work should be enshrined—enshrined, I say. Don’t I know? Have I not read Common Sense, The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason? Read them—reread them, I tell you! I sleep with The Rights of Man under my pillow, so that if I spend a night in wakefulness, insomnia shall not rob me but become instead a privilege. You and I are the only republicans, the only men with vision enough to look beyond the stars! A United States of the World?—I agree with you. I say an end to autocracy, an end to dictatorship! I take up your torch!”

  Bewildered, Paine could only sit there and stare at the little man. What do words mean? Had he been mistaken? Does Utopia come out of such blustering and through no other manner? He didn’t know; his head was whirling. Perhaps he had listened only to the lies that were spoken about Bonaparte; they told lies about Paine too.

  “I need you,” Napoleon said. “We are both dedicated to mankind, to Republican France, and if we work together who can say to what lengths the dreams of Citizen Paine and Citizen Bonaparte may not go? Soon I will have a military council, and if you will sit there, I will be both honored and rewarded.”

  The old man was staring at him.

  “You agree then?” Bonaparte smiled; his smile could be very winning.

  “I will think of it,” Paine nodded. “I will think of it.”

  After Napoleon had gone, Paine went up to his room, shaking off Madame Bonneville who would have a first-hand account of every word that had been spoken. He wanted to be alone; he wanted to think back and see what had brought him to this. In his room, he saw himself very plainly, the trash and dirt all about him, the old, stained dressing gown that he wore, the grime under his nails, the disarray of his gray hair. He found a comb and began to draw it through his thinning strands, musing all the while on these last years in Republican France.

  Would he meet with Bonaparte? “Why not?” he asked himself. “Didn’t I go back to the Convention again? I have not abandoned men; they have abandoned me and my principles. If the only hope left is Bonaparte, then I will go to him.”

  Hope had returned, a future had returned, and once more he was Thomas Paine,
champion of mankind. He was going to sit at a military council with Bonaparte. After he had shaved, he looked in his mirror and said:

  “Ten years younger—a man is as young as he feels. When Franklin was my age, the revolution had not yet started. They will say of Paine that his life began at sixty, that he taught the world that the mind does not grow old.”

  He had money, for his books were selling well, and he stuffed his wallet greedily. The devil with the future. First clothes, and then the hairdresser; a man does not go to the hairdresser in rags.

  At the tailor’s, a brow was raised until he snapped angrily, “I am Citizen Paine, damn you! Enough of that and show me your styles.”

  “Something special, perhaps? Something for an occasion?”

  “Something for a military council,” he said, as offhand as he could. “Bonaparte will be there.”

  And then a hurry and a scurry, clerks running from all over the place.

  “Something simple, black, I think.”

  “Naturally, black, citizen. One recognizes that for such an occasion a black worsted, in keeping with your background, and perhaps a touch of satin to add dignity—”

  He bought shirts and shoes and stockings; the generals of France would not sneer at Tom Paine. Then, clothed in his fine new raiment, he went to the hairdresser. There were no secrets from a Parisian hairdresser. “I look too old, much too old,” Paine said. “When a man still has work to do and people to meet, important people, he desires to make a certain impression.”

  The years can’t be bounced off so fatuously, and when Paine came back to the Bonneville house, the reaction had set in. He sat in the parlor in his new clothes, staring at the place Bonaparte had occupied, the pudgy little man with the thin face, the commanding voice, the savior of mankind—

  Bonneville came in, glanced at Paine, raised a brow but politely refrained from any comment.

  “Tricked out like a popinjay,” Paine smiled, a note of dejection in his voice. “Do you like it, Nicholas?”

  “Very much,” Bonneville nodded.

  “Necessary,” Paine shrugged. “I am embarking on a new career. When everything else is done and gone, the great Napoleon Bonaparte visits me, makes me his confidant, and informs me that he sleeps each night with a copy of The Rights of Man under his pillow. Either his pillow is too low, or I have been mistaken in the man.” Paine leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes for a moment or two, then whispered:

  “Nicholas, I am afraid. This is my last hope. What if it fails?”

  As he entered the room where the council was being held, the military men, the engineers, admirals, generals, and political advisors who made up the group, each rose and bowed under the watchful eye of Bonaparte, who said again and again, very ingratiatingly:

  “Here is Citizen Paine, messieurs, of whom you have heard. If you saw me with a book in my hands during one of our passages in arms, you may be sure that it was something Citizen Paine wrote. I introduce him as the first republican.”

  They were all very happy to meet Citizen Paine. Some he knew; most he had heard of, Bonaparte’s generals and advisors, some of them intriguers, others open-faced men who had started off in the blue smock of the national militia in those dim, distant days of the Republic, and now were faintly troubled—though vastly impressed—by the heights to which they had risen. Some had been confidants of Robespierre and looked at Paine none too kindly; others dated from the Girondin times. It was only in events, not in years, that those periods were so ancient; almost entirely, the men at the council were young, Paine standing awkwardly among them like a fragment of the past.

  It was the first time he had been in a group of French leaders and felt such a biting, incisive insularity. Heretofore, France and the world could be identified; Paris was civilization, and the revolution excluded nobody. Even during the worst of The Terror, when the revolution lashed out so frantically, it did so to defend itself, not to make itself exclusive. And in the beginning, many, many foreigners had sat in the National Convention along with native Frenchmen. The light-haired, stolid-faced, grim and tired Polish radicals had come to Paris after fighting alongside the Americans in the Revolution; British exiles, too, had come by the hundreds, Prussians who loathed what Prussia had come to stand for, Italians who dreamed of a free Italy, Spaniards who dreamed of a free Spain; they had all come to a rendezvous at Paris, because Paris was the heart and soul of the revolution, and the Parisians had welcomed them.

  But here that was gone; this was a narrow, close gathering, and the terms used were entirely terms of military conquest. Enough of such drivel as freedom and liberty and fraternity and equality; this was Bonaparte.

  When they said, “Most pleased to greet you, Citizen Paine,” he knew they were thinking, “How useful will this Englishman be?”

  When he spoke—and his French was still execrable, for all the years he had spent in France—they could not keep their lips from curling at his accent; and when they, in turn, said something which they did not wish him to understand, they lapsed into their quick, flashing patois, a rippling flow of sound that was utterly meaningless to Paine.

  Finally, they were all assembled, and the council came to order. The men were seated in the form of a horseshoe, at the open end of which Napoleon stood behind a small table. There was a chair for him, but not once during the council did he sit down. Most of the time he paced back and forth, as if consumed by a nervous energy which would give him no rest. When he spoke, his head poked forward like a bird’s and sometimes he would fling an arm at the man to whom he was speaking. Paine had a feeling that through all his thoughts, through all his scheming, planning, lightening-quick decisions, he was never for a moment forgetful of the fact that he was so small, so pudgy, so little physically of what a great conqueror should be. His French was not the French of the others; it rasped, it grated, it popped sometimes like rapid fire. He could be imperious, and a moment later, meek and humble; he had a black forelock which in moments of anger he shook down over his high white brow, over his eye. He could be crossed only when he asked himself to be crossed.

  “We speak not of France, not of Europe, but of the world,” he began.

  Marcy: “And the world belongs to England.”

  “Does it? I presume more of the world. I presume it is not the possession of a nation of clerks and shopkeepers.”

  D’Arcon: “They are very good sailors.”

  Bonaparte: “One does not have to be a Columbus to cross the English Channel.”

  Gabreou: “That, sir, makes it a question of transport and potentials. I have no doubt that with the continent of Europe at our backs, we can outbuild them ten to one. If it is merely a question of putting an army ashore on the coast of England, we should not regard that as an obstacle, but rather as a problem.”

  Bonaparte: “Then as a problem?”

  Gabreou: “It can be solved, naturally.”

  D’Arçon: “I am sorry, sir, if I do not see it that way. At least all our first brigades will be cut to pieces unless we raise some sort of diversion among the people. The manpower of France is not limitless, and there is no operation so difficult as a landing against a defended line of coast.”

  Bonaparte: “We have with us that illustrious republican, Citizen Paine. Already, I think, I have made it clear to him that our whole movement is a continuation of the revolution. Citizen Paine has had signal success with the revolutionary cause in England. We may presume that had not the liberal party abandoned him to the Tories, he would have been successful. What do you say, Citizen Paine, to a popular uprising in England?”

  Paine: “There is no doubt that the British people have grievances enough against their rulers.”

  Bonaparte: “Then they will aid a French army? They will not resist?”

  Paine (very quietly): “I think they will resist, sir. I think they will cut your army to pieces. I think that if you invade England, not a man of the invading force will return to France.”

  Bonaparte: �
��Are you trying to make a fool of me, citizen?”

  Paine (uncertainly): “I don’t know—it is so many years since I have been in England. I did not think, coming here, that it would be a question of military invasion.”

  D’Arçon: “Did Citizen Paine imagine that we proposed to invade England without weapons?”

  Paine (very uncertainly): “I didn’t know—I thought that the revolution would be reaffirmed. The English people are disaffected and mistreated, but that would not matter in the case of invasion.”

  Bonaparte: “And why would that not matter?”

  Paine: “Because, my general, it must be understood that in England there are two things, the people and the empire. The empire can be destroyed, but the people cannot be conquered. Force would only unify them, and if you were to land an army on their shores they would forget that they work for sixpence a day and remember only that they are Englishmen. The revolution must come from within them, not with invasion. With the empire, it is another matter.”

  Bonaparte (very evenly and coldly): “And how is it another matter with the empire, Citizen Paine?”

  Paine (wavering, but his voice gaining in strength as he speaks): “The empire is vulnerable. Make peace, promote franchise, reassert the principles of the Republic and proclaim them throughout Europe, cry out for the rights of man, win back the glory of Republican France and ally yourself with Republican America. What is the empire? Commerce? Then proclaim the freedom of the seas and enforce it; America will join you; abolish duties and open the ports, and see how long Britain can compete with you. Is the empire subjugation? Then glorify France, establish old-age pensions, lower the working hours, raise the pay of the poor, and proclaim the revolution far and wide. Then the English people will rise up and join you. England can’t be conquered, but she can be won.”

  There was a silence after that, a silence so deep and ominous that Paine felt sick and afraid. From the old sores, there was heat and fire as he felt his way back to his chair. This end, this last frail hope was over. This was the outcome of all he had lived for, invasion of the green shores of England, death and destruction to all the small men and women he had once promised to lead from the abyss into bright sunlight.