hundred dollars. Paine was dejected by his unsatisfactory position, and his health was beginning to fail. His vote was rejected at New Rochelle, on the ground that he was not an American citizen; and, in spite of his protests, he failed to get his claim recognised. He let his farm at New Rochelle, and lodged with a painter named Jarvis in New York. In August 1806 he writes that he has had a fit of apoplexy. His last book, an ‘Essay on Dreams,’ continuing the argument of the ‘Age of Reason,’ had been written previously, and was published in 1807. In the autumn of that year he was much irritated by attacks in a New York paper, which led, in the next year, to a bitter controversy with James Cheetham, editor of the ‘American Citizen.’ Cheetham was an Englishman, and had been a disciple of Paine. Paine now attacked him for deserting Jefferson while still enjoying the government patronage. Paine, in the beginning of 1808, again applied to congress for some reward. He was anxious about money. He lodged during ten months of 1808 with a baker named Hitt in New York. He afterwards went to a miserable lodging at 63 Partition Street, and contracted to sell his farm at New Rochelle for ten thousand dollars. In July 1808 he moved to a better house in Herring Street, near Mme. Bonneville. In January 1809 he made his will, leaving all his property to Mme. Bonneville and her children; and in April moved to a house, now 59 Grove Street, where Mme. Bonneville came to nurse him. He died there on 8 July 1809.
Paine was more or less ‘ostracised’ by society during his last stay in America. Political and theological antipathies were strong, and Paine, as at once the assailant of Washington and the federalists and the author of the ‘Age of Reason,’ was hated by one party, while the other was shy of claiming his support. It has also been said that his conduct was morally offensive, and charges against him have been accepted without due caution. His antagonist, Cheetham, made them prominent in a life published in 1809. He accused Paine of having seduced Mme. Bonneville, of habitual drunkenness, and of disgustingly filthy habits. The charges were supported by a letter to Paine from Carver, with whom Paine had lodged. Mme. Bonneville immediately sued Cheetham for slander. Cheetham made some attempt to support his case with the help of Carver, but Carver retracted the charge; it completely broke down, and the jury at once found Cheetham guilty. Cheetham was sentenced to the modest fine of 150 dollars. The judge, said to be a federalist, observed in mitigation that his book ‘served the cause of religion.’ It is very intelligible that Mme. Bonneville's position should have suggested scandal, but all the evidence goes to show that it was groundless. Paine's innumerable enemies never accused him of sexual immorality, and in that respect his life seems to have been blameless. The special charges of drunkenness made by Cheetham and Carver are discredited by this proof of their character; Carver's letter to Paine was written or dictated by Cheetham, and seems to have been part of an attempt to extort money. Carver afterwards confessed that he had lied as to the drink (Conway, ii. 388–404).
It is admitted, however, that the charge of drinking was not without foundation. Paine confessed to Rickman that he had fallen into excesses in Paris. Mr. Conway thinks that this refers solely to a few weeks in 1793. Even Cheetham (p. 99) admits that the habit began at the time of the French revolution. It seems, indeed, that Paine had occasionally yielded to the ordinary habits of the day. His publisher, Chapman, at the trial in 1792, spoke of Paine's intoxication on one occasion. It was ‘rather unusual,’ he says, for Paine to be drunk, but he adds that when drunk he was given to declaiming upon religion (State Trials, xxii. 402). A similar account of an after-dinner outburst upon religion is given by Paine's friend, Henry Redhead Yorke, who visited him in Paris in 1802, found him greatly broken in health, and speaks also of the filthy state of his apartment (see Yorke, Letters from Paris, 1814, ii. 338–69). Mr. Conway says that his nose became red when he was about fifty-five, i.e. about 1792. In America Paine changed from brandy to rum. Bale was told that he took a quart of rum a week at New Rochelle, and in 1808 his weekly supply seems to have been three quarts. He had, it appears, to be kept alive by stimulants during one of his illnesses, and his physical prostration may account for the stimulants and for some of the slovenly habits of which Carver gives disgusting, and no doubt grossly exaggerated, details. Paine had been neat in his dress, ‘like a gentleman of the old school’ (says Joel Barlow); but after coming to New York, the neglect of society made him slovenly (Todd, Joel Barlow, p. 236). Barlow's account, though Mr. Conway attributes it to an admission of a statement by Cheetham, indicates a belief that Paine's habits of drinking had excluded him from good society in his last years. On the other hand, various contemporary witnesses, including Jarvis, with whom Paine
