"The rank and file followed their Thomas Paine with a faith that crowned heads might envy. The London men knew Paine thoroughly. The treasures of the world would not draw him, nor any terrors drive him, to the side of cruelty and inhumanity. Their eye was upon him. Had Paine, after the king's execution, despaired of the republic there might have ensued some demoralization among his followers in London. But they saw him by the side of the delivered prisoner of the Bastile, Brissot, an author well known in England, by the side of Condorcet and others of Franklin's honored circle engaged in a death struggle with the fire-breathing dragon called 'The Mountain.' That was the same unswerving man they had been following, and to all accusations against the revolution their answer was--Paine is still there."--_Ibid._ While Paine allied himself to no particular faction of the convention, his sympathies were with the Girondins. Lamartine says: "Paine, the friend of Madame Roland, Condorcet and Brissot, had been elected by the town of Calais; the Girondins consulted him and placed him on the committee of surveyance." The Girondins comprised, for the most part, the wisest and the best of France's legislators. Had they remained in power the excesses of the revolution would, to a great extent, have been avoided. But in an evil hour the Jacobins gained the ascendancy and while they ruled madness reigned supreme. The Girondins were slaughtered or expelled. In one night twenty-two of them--every one a noted statesman or orator--the very flower of French manhood, "the eloquent, the young, the beautiful, the brave," as Riouffe, their fellow prisoner, lovingly describes them, were taken before a Jacobin tribunal and condemned to death. Carlyle thus graphically and pathetically tells us how they died: "All Paris is out; such a crowd as no man had seen. The death-carts, Valaze's cold corpse [he had committed suicide] stretched among the yet living twenty-one, roll along. Bareheaded, hands bound, in their shirt sleeves, coat flung loosely round the neck; so fare the eloquent of France; bemurmured, beshouted. To the shouts of Vive la Republique, some of them keep answering with counter shouts of Vive la Republique. Others, as Brissot, sit sunk in silence. At the foot of the scaffold they again strike up, with appropriate variations, the hymn of the Marseilles. Such an act of music; conceive it well! The yet living chant there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak! Samson's axe is rapid; one head per minute, or a little less. The chorus is wearing weak; the chorus is worn out; farewell, forevermore, ye Girondins. Te-Deum Fauchet has become silent; Valaze's dead head is lopped; the sickle of the guillotine has reaped the Girondins all away."