Madame Bonneville had in court eminent witnesses to her character,--Thomas Addis Emmet, Fulton, Jarvis, and ladies whose children she had taught French. Yet the scandal was too tempting an illustration of the "Age of Reason" to disappear with Cheetham's defeat. Americans in their peaceful habitations were easily made suspicious of a French woman who had left her husband in Paris and followed Paine; they could little realize the complications into which ten tempestuous years had thrown thousands of families in France, and how such poor radicals as the Bonnevilles had to live as they could. The scandal branched into variants. Twenty-five years later pious Grant Thorburn promulgated that Paine had run off from Paris with the wife of a tailor named Palmer. "Paine made no scruples of living with this woman openly." (Mrs. Elihu Palmer, in her penury, was employed by Paine to attend to his rooms, etc, during a few months of illness.) As to Madame Bonneville, whose name Grant Thorburn seems not to have heard, she was turned into a romantic figure. Thorburn says that Paine escaped the guillotine by the execution of another man in his place. "The man who suffered death for Paine, left a widow, with two young children in poor circumstances. Paine brought them all to this country, supported them while he lived, and, it is said, left most of his property to them when he died. The widow and children lived in apartments up town by themselves. He then boarded with Carver. I believe his conduct was disinterested and honorable to the widow. She appeared to be about thirty years of age, and was far from being handsome."* * "Forty Years' Residence in America." Grant Thorburn was afterwards led to doubt whether this woman was the widow of the man guillotined, but declares that when "Paine first brought her out, he and his friends passed her off as such." As a myth of the time (1834), and an indication that Paine's generosity to the Bonneville family was well known in New York, the story is worth quoting. But the Bonnevilles never escaped from the scandal. Long years afterward, when the late Gen. Bonneville was residing in St. Louis, it was whispered about that he was the natural son of Thomas Paine, though he was born before Paine ever met Madame Bonneville. Of course it has gone into the religious encyclopaedias. The best of them, that of McClintock and Strong, says: "One of the women he supported [in France] followed him to this country." After the fall of Napoleon, Nicholas Bonneville, relieved of his surveillance, hastened to New York, where he and his family were reunited, and enjoyed the happiness provided by Paine's self-sacrificing economy.