ranted him three
thousand dollars, and the Legislature of New York granted him an estate
of 500 acres of highly cultivated land, the confiscated property of a
Loyalist. Having no more revolutionary occupation in the United States,
he embarked for France in 1787, with a letter of recommendation from Dr.
Franklin to the Duke de la Rochefoucault. From Paris he went to London,
where, the following year, he was arrested for debt, but was bailed by
some American merchants. He went to Paris in 1791 to publish, under the
name of 'Achilles Du Chatellet,' a tract _recommending the abolition of
royalty_. He again returned to London and wrote the first part of his
'Rights of Man,' in answer to Mr. Burke's 'Reflections on the French
Revolution.' The second part was published early in 1792. He was ordered
to be arrested and prosecuted for his seditious and blasphemous
writings, but escaped to France, and was elected a member of the French
National Convention--grateful for the honour which the bloody anarchists
had conferred upon him by electing him a member of their order. His
conduct, however, offended the Jacobins, and towards the close of the
year 1793 he was excluded from the convention, was arrested and
committed to the prison of the Luxembourg. Just before his confinement
he had finished the first part of his 'Age of Reason,' and confided it
to the care of his friend Joel Barlow for publication. He was now taken
ill, to which circumstance he ascribed his escape from the guillotine;
and on the fall of Robespierre was released. In 1795 he published, at
Paris, the second part of his 'Age of Reason.' He returned to America in
1802, bringing with him a woman named Madame Bonneville, whom he had
seduced away from her husband, with her two sons, and whom he seems to
have treated with the utmost meanness and tyranny. His friend and
American biographer, Mr. Cheetham, in continuation, gives the following
account of Paine's arrival at New York in 1802: 'The writer,' says Mr.
Cheetham, 'supposing him (Paine) to be a gentleman, was employed to
engage a room for him at Lovett's hotel, New York. On his arrival, in
1802, about ten at night, he wrote me a note, desiring to see me
immediately. I waited on him at Lovett's, in company with Mr. George
Clinton, jun. We rapped at the door. A small figure opened it within,
meanly dressed, having an old top-coat, without an under one; a dirty
silk handkerchief loosely thrown around his neck, a long beard