victims. Even at the height of the Terror men were not executed without trial, nor without an indictment having been drawn up by Fouquier Tinville, and served upon them at least overnight, which the prisoners jestingly styled "the evening newspaper." Removal to the Conciergerie, which adjoined the tribunal, was likewise in almost all cases the first indication of an approaching trial. Not one of these preliminaries had been accomplished in Paine's case. Carlyle, contrary to his practice, cites no authority for the story, but a variation of it appeared in the newspapers in 1823, in a biography of Sampson Perry, likewise a prisoner at the Luxembourg, who may have been accustomed to tell this traveller's tale. Numbers of survivors of the Terror pretended indeed to have been ordered for execution and saved by Robespierre's fall; whereas the tribunal took a holiday on Décadi, the Jacobin Sabbath, and of the fifteen cases prepared for trial on the 11th Thermidor, there was not one of any note. Paine's death-warrant was really signed, but it consisted in this memorandum, found in Robespierre's notebook:—"Demander que Thomas Payne soit décrété d'accusation, pour les intérêts de l'Amérique autant que de la France."
This animosity can be explained. When Marat was prosecuted in April 1793, Paine gave information to the Jacobin Club that, addressing him once in English in the lobby of the Convention, Marat
