to France, and was convicted in his absence of high treason.

Paine landed at Calais an outlaw, to find himself already elected its
deputy to the Convention. As in America, so in France, his was the first
voice to urge the uncompromising solution. He advocated the abolition of
the monarchy; but his was a courage that always served humanity. The
work which he did as a member, with Sieyes, Danton, Condorcet, and five
others, of the little committee named to draft the constitution, was
ephemeral. His brave pleading for the King's life was a deed that
deserves to live. He loved to think of himself as a woodman swinging an
axe against rotten institutions and dying beliefs; but he weighted no
guillotines. Paine argued against the command that we should "love our
enemies," but he would not persecute them. This knight-errant would
fling his shield over the very spies who tracked his steps. In Paris he
saved the life of one of Pitt's agents who had vilified him, and
procured the liberation of a bullying English officer who had struck him
in public. The Terror made mercy a traitor, and Paine found himself
overwhelmed in the vengeance which overtook all that was noblest in the
Revolution. He spent ten months in prison, racked with fever, and an
anecdote which seems to be authentic, tells how he escaped death by the
negligence of a jailor. This overworked official hastily chalked the
sign which meant that a prisoner was marked for next batch of the
guillotine's victims, on the inside instead of the outside of Paine's
cell-door.

Condorcet, in hiding and awaiting death, wrote in these months his
_Sketch_ of human progress. Paine, meditating on the end that seemed
near, composed the first part of his _Age of Reason_. Paine was, like
Franklin, Jefferson and Washington, a deist; and he differed from them
only in the courage which prompted him to declare his belief. He came
from gaol a broken man, hardly able to stand, while the Convention,
returned to its sound senses, welcomed him back to his place of honour
on its benches. The record of his last years in America, whither he
returned in 1802, belongs rather to the history of persecution than to
the biography of a soldier of liberty. His work was done; and, though
his pen was still active and influential, slave-owners, ex-royalists,
and the fanatics of orthodoxy combined to embitter the end of the man
who had dared to deny the inspiration of the Bible. His book was burned
in England b