Thomas Paine loved his friends with sincere and tender affection. His simplicity of heart and that happy kind of openness, or rather, carelessness, which charms our hearts in reading the fables of the good Lafontaine, made him extremely amiable. If little children were near him he patted them, searched his pockets for the store of cakes, biscuits, sugarplums, pieces of sugar, of which he used to take possession as of a treasure belonging to them, and the distribution of which belonged to him.* His conversation was unaffectedly simple and frank; his language natural; always abounding in curious anecdotes. He justly and fully seized the characters of all those of whom he related any singular traits. For his conversation was satyrick, instructive, full of witticisms. If he related an anecdote a second time, it was always in the same words and the same tone, like a comic actor who knows the place where he is to be applauded. He neither cut the tale short nor told it too circumstantially. It was real conversation, enlivened by digressions well brought in. The vivacity of his mind, and the numerous scenes of which he had been a spectator, or in which he had been an actor, rendered his narrations the more animated, his conversation more endearing. His memory was admirable. Politics were his favorite subject He never spoke on religious subjects, unless pressed to it, and never disputed about such matters. He could not speak French: he could understand it tolerably well when spoken to him, and he understood it when on paper perfectly well. He never went to the theatre: never spoke on dramatic subjects. He rather delighted in ridiculing poetry. He did not like it: he said it was not a serious thing, but a sport of the mind, which often had not common sense. His common reading was the affairs of the day; not a single newspaper escaped him; not a political discussion: he knew how to strike while the iron was hot; and, as he was always on the watch, he was always ready to write. Hence all his pamphlets have been popular and powerful. He wrote with composure and steadiness, as if under the guidance of a tutelary genius. If, for an instant, he stopped, it was always in the attitude of a man who listens. The Saint Jerome of Raphael would give a perfect idea of his contemplative recollection, to listen to the voice from on high which makes itself heard in the heart. [It will be proper, I believe, to say here, that shortly after the Death of Thomas Paine a book appeared, under the Title of: The Life of Thomas Paine, by Cheethatn. In this libel my character was calumniated. I cited the Author before the Criminal Court of New York, He was tried and in spite of all his manœuvres, he was found guilty.--M. B. de Bonneville.] This last paragraph, in brackets, is in the writing of Madame Bonneville.