"So much, my dear Sir, for what memory can command. You will, I think, find papers containing a more accurate statement in the New York 'Evening Post,' about the time when Mr. Rodney's opinion was made public. At least I recollect having seen in that gazette some facts with which I had not been previously acquainted, or which I had forgotten. A gentleman from Connecticut, who was on the Committee of Claims last year, can I believe give you the papers. I remember also to have been told by a respectable young gentleman, son of the late Mr. Richard Henry Lee, that important evidence on this subject, secured from his uncle Arthur, was in his possession, and I believe it may be obtained from Mr. Carroll of Annapolis, or his son-in-law Mr. Harper of Baltimore." "The Hon'le Mr. John Randolph, of Roanoke." Beaumarchais, barely escaping the guillotine, died in poverty in Holland. He bequeathed his claim to his daughter who (1835) was Paid 800,000 francs, but the million which he had received from the King and then charged on the United States, was never paid. Silas Deane suffered a worse fate. His claims for commissions and services in France remained unpaid, and after his return to France he occupied himself with writing to his brother Simeon the letters meant to be intercepted, printed by Rivington in 1782. In these letters he urges submission to England. Franklin took the charitable view that his head had been turned by his misfortunes. He went over to England, where he became the friend of Benedict Arnold, and died in poverty in 1789. In recent years his heirs were paid $35,000 by Congress. But had his treachery, as now revealed in the letters of George III., been known, there had been no such payment. * The documents referred to are no doubt among the Lee Papers preserved at the University of Virginia, which I have examined. The determination with which Paine, to his cost, withstood Deane, may seem at first glance quixotic His attack was animated by a belief that the supplies sent from France were a covert gift, and at any rate, that the demand for instant payment to agents was fraudulent. Evidence having been supplied, by the publication of Beaumarchais notes to Arthur Lee, under pseudonym of "Mary Johnston," that returns in tobacco were expected, this, if not a mercantile mask, was still a matter of credit, and very different from payments demanded by Beaumarchais and Deane from the scanty treasury of the struggling colonies.* But there was something more behind the vehemence of Paine's letters.