"How Paine loved those men--Brissot, Condorcet, Lasource, Duchatel, Vergniaud, Gensonne! Never was man more devoted to his intellectual comrades. Even across a century one may realize what it meant to him, that march of his best friends to the scaffold."--_Dr. Conway._ Eight days after the execution of the Girondins another of Paine's friends, Madame Roland, the "Inspiring Soul" of the Girondins--one of the greatest, one of the fairest, one of the bravest, and one of the noblest women that ever came to brighten our planet--died on the same scaffold. Beautiful in life, Madame Roland rose to sublimity in death. Standing on the scaffold, robed in white, she seemed like a lovely bride before the altar. She asked for pen and paper to record "the strange thoughts that were rising in her" as she gazed into the eyes of death. This request denied, she turned toward the statue of liberty and, with tearful eyes, exclaimed, "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" Then, seeing the one who was to have preceded her to the guillotine trembling with fear, she begged and obtained permission to take his place--to die first--that she might soften the terrors of death by showing him "how easy it is to die." This is her picture--painted by Carlyle: "Noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud eyes, long black hair flowing down to the girdle; and as brave a heart as ever beat in woman's bosom! Like a white Grecian statue, serenely complete, she shines in that black wreck of things;--long memorable." "What with the arrestations and flights Paine found himself, in June, almost alone. In the convention he was sometimes the solitary figure left on the plain, where but now sat the brilliant statesmen of France. They, his beloved friends, have started in procession towards the guillotine, for even flight must end there; daily others are pressed into their ranks; his own summons, he feels, is only a question of a few weeks or days."--_Dr. Conway._ Madame Roland died in November; Paine was imprisoned in December. Dictionary of Religious Knowledge: "Here [trial of Louis XVI] his honorable moderation won the enmity of Robespierre, who marked him for a victim." Scheaf's Religious Encyclopedia: "He had the courage to vote against the execution of Louis XVI., and thus incurred the anger of Robespierre, who threw him into prison." Chambers' Encyclopedia of English Literature: "He offended the Robespierre faction, and in 1794 [December 28, 1793], possibly by the procurement of the American minister, Gouverneur Morris--who disliked the French revolution and the alliance between the new republics--he was imprisoned." Col. Thomas W. Higginson: "They urged him (he was in personal danger) to go back to America, the country he had served so long. 'Go there,' they said; 'it is your country,' 'No,' he said, 'for the time, this is my country.'... So said Thomas Paine, and the doors of the Bastile closed around him."