On June 7th Robespierre demanded a more stringent law against foreigners, and one was soon after passed ordering their imprisonment. It was understood that this could not apply to the two foreigners in the Convention--Paine and Anacharsis Clootz,--though it was regarded as a kind of warning to them. I have seen it stated, but without authority, that Paine had been admonished by Danton to stay away from the Convention on June 2d, and from that day there could not be the slightest utility in his attendance. The Mountaineers had it all their own way. For simply criticising the Constitution they brought forward in place of that of the first committee, Condorcet had to fly from prosecution. Others also fled, among them Brissot and Duchatel. What with the arrestations and flights Paine found himself, in June, almost alone. In the Convention he was sometimes the solitary figure left on the Plain, where but now sat the brilliant statesmen of France. They, his beloved friends, have started in procession towards the guillotine, for even flight must end there; daily others are pressed into their ranks; his own summons, he feels, is only a question of a few weeks or days. How Paine loved those men--Brissot, Condorcet, Lasource, Ducha-tel, Vergniaud, Gensonné! Never was man more devoted to his intellectual comrades. Even across a century one may realize what it meant to him, that march of some of his best friends to the scaffold, while others were hunted through France, and the agony of their families, most of whom he well knew.
Alas, even this is not the worst! For what were the personal fate of himself or any compared with the fearful fact that the harvest is past and the republic not saved! Thus had ended all his labors, and his visions of the Commonwealth of Man. The time had come when many besides poor Johnson sought peace in annihilation. Paine, heartbroken, sought oblivion in brandy. Recourse to such anaesthetic, of which any affectionate man might fairly avail himself under such incredible agony as the ruin of his hopes and the approaching murder of his dearest friends, was hitherto unknown in Paine's life. He drank freely, as was the custom of his time; but with the exception of the evidence of an enemy at his trial in England, that he once saw him under the influence of wine after a dinner party (1792), which he admitted was "unusual," no intimation of excess is discoverable in any contemporary record of Paine until this his fifty-seventh year. He afterwards told his friend Rickman that, "borne down by public and private affliction, he had been driven to excesses in Paris"; and, as it was about this time that Gouverneur Morris and Colonel Bosville, who had reasons for disparaging Paine, reported stories of his drunkenness (growing ever since), we may assign the excesses mainly to June. It will be seen by comparison of the dates of events and documents presently mentioned that Paine could not have remained long in this pardonable refuge of mental misery. Charlotte Corday's poignard cut a rift in the black cloud. After that tremendous July 13th there is positive evidence not only of sobriety, but of life and work on Paine's part that make the year memorable.