“They have not yet accused Providence of Infidelity.  Yet, according to their outrageous piety, she (Providence) must be as bad as Thomas Paine; she has protected him in all his dangers, patronised him in all his undertakings, encouraged him in all his ways....”

It is true, as Mr. van der Weyde points out in an article in The Truth Seeker (N.Y.), that a most extraordinary and beneficent luck,—­or was it rather a guardian angel?—­stood guard over Paine.  His narrow escapes from death would make a small book in themselves.  I will only mention one here.

During his imprisonment in the Luxembourg Prison in Paris, Thomas Paine was one of the many who were sentenced to be guillotined at that period when the moral temperature of France was many degrees above the normal mark, and men doled out death more freely than sous.  It was the custom among the jailers to make a chalk mark upon the door of each cell that held a man condemned.  Paine was one of a “consignment” of one hundred and sixty-eight prisoners sentenced to be beheaded at dawn, and the jailer made the fateful chalk mark upon his door along with the others, that the guards would know he was destined for the tumbrel that rolled away from the prison hour by hour all through the night. But his door chanced to be open, so that the mark, hastily made, turned out to be on the wrong side!  When the door was closed it was inside, and no one knew of it; so the guard passed on, and Paine lived.

It is interesting but difficult to write about Thomas Paine.

The trouble about him is that his personality is too overwhelming to be cut and measured in proper lengths by any writer.  He does not lend himself, like lesser historical figures, to continuous or disinterested narrative.  The authors who have been rash enough to try to tell something about him can no more pick and choose the incidents of his career that will make the most effective “stuff” than they could reduce the phenomena of a cyclone or the aurora borealis to a consistent narrative form.

Thus:  One starts to speak of Paine’s experiences in Paris, and brings up in New Rochelle; one endeavours to anchor him in Greenwich, only to find oneself trailing his weary but stubborn footsteps in the war!  And always and forever, Paine himself persists in crowding out the legitimate sequence of his adventures.  No one can soberly write the story of his life; one can, at best, only achieve a diatribe or an apotheosis!

Said he: 

     “The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from
     darkness.”

This quotation might almost serve as a text for the life of Paine, might it not?  And yet—­there are people in the world who wear smoked glasses, through which, I imagine, the sun himself looks not unlike a muddy splash of yellow paint upon the heavens!

This is a book about Greenwich Village and not a defence of Thomas Paine.  Yet, since the reader has come with me thus far, I am going to take advantage of his courteous attention for just another moment of digression.  Here is my promise:  that it shall take up a small, small space.