Paine wrote this letter on September 10, 1794. Robespierre, three months before that, had ceased to attend the Committee, disavowing responsibility for its actions: Paine was not released. Robespierre, when the letter to Monroe was written, had been dead more than six months: Paine was not released The prisoner had therefore good reason to look behind Robespierre for his enemies; and although the fatal sentence found in the Note Book, and a private assurance of Barrère, caused him to ascribe his wrongs to Robespierre, farther reflection convinced him that hands more hidden had also been at work. He knew that Robespierre was a man of measured words, and pondered the sentence that he should "be decreed of accusation for the interests of America as much as of France." In a letter written in 1802, Paine said: "There must have been a coalition in sentiment, if not in fact, between the terrorists of America and the terrorists of France, and Robespierre must have known it, or he could not have had the idea of putting America into the bill of accusation against me." Robespierre, he remarks, assigned no reason for his imprisonment. The secret for which Paine groped has remained hidden for a hundred years. It is painful to reveal it now, but historic justice, not only to the memory of Paine, but to that of some eminent contemporaries of his, demands that the facts be brought to light. The appointment of Gouverneur Morris to be Minister to France, in 1792, passed the Senate by 16 to 11 votes. The President did not fail to advise him of this reluctance, and admonish him to be more cautious in his conduct. In the same year Paine took his seat in the Convention. Thus the royalist and republican tendencies, whose struggles made chronic war in Washington's Cabinet, had their counterpart in Paris, where our Minister Morris wrote royalist, and Paine republican, manifestoes. It will have been seen, by quotations from his diary already given, that Gouverneur Morris harbored a secret hostility towards Paine; and it is here assumed that those entries and incidents are borne in mind. The Diary shows an appearance of friendly terms between the two; Morris dines Paine and receives information from him. The royalism of Morris and humanity of Paine brought them into a common desire to save the life of Louis.