Here were loud murmurs from the "Mountain," answered with demands for liberty of opinion. Thuriot sprang to his feet crying, "This is not the language of Thomas Paine." Marat mounted the tribune and asked Paine some questions, apparently in English, then descending he said to the Assembly in French: "I denounce the interpreter, and I maintain that such is not the opinion of Thomas Paine. It is a wicked and faithless translation."*
* "Venant d'un démocrate tel que Thomas Paine, d'un homme qui avait vécu parmi les Américains, d'un penseur, cette déclaration parut si dangereuse à Marat que, pour en détruire l'effet, il n'hésita pas à s'écrier: 'Je dénonce le truchement. Je soutiens que ce n'est point là l'opinion do Thomas Paine. C'est une traduction infidèle.'"--Louis Blanc. See also "Histoire Parliamentaire," xxiii., p. 250.
These words, audacious as mendacious, caused a tremendous uproar. Garran came to the rescue of the frightened clerk, declaring that he had read the original, and the translation was correct. Paine stood silent and calm during the storm. The clerk proceeded:
"Your Executive Committee will nominate an ambassador to Philadelphia; my sincere wish is that he may announce to America that the National Convention of France, out of pure friendship to America, has consented to respite Louis. That people, your only ally, have asked you by my vote to delay the execution.
"Ah, citizens, give not the tyrant of England the triumph of seeing the man perish on a scaffold who helped my dear brothers of America to break his chains!"
At the conclusion of this speech Marat "launched himself into the middle of the hall" and cried out that Paine had "voted against the punishment of death because he was a Quaker." Paine replied, "I voted against it both morally and politically."
Had the vote been taken that day perhaps Louis might have escaped. Brissot, shielded from charges of royalism by Paine's republican fame, now strongly supported his cause. "A cruel precipitation," he cried, "may alienate our friends in England, Ireland, America. Take care! The opinion of European peoples is worth to you armies!" But all this only brought out the Mountain's particular kind of courage; they were ready to defy the world--Washington included--in order to prove that a King's neck was no more than any other man's. Marat's clan--the "Nihilists" of the time, whose strength was that they stopped at nothing--had twenty-four hours to work in; they surrounded the Convention next day with a mob howling for "justice!" Fifty-five members were absent; of the 690 present a majority of seventy decided that Louis XVI. should die within twenty-four hours.