 He arrived in Paris shortly before the September massacres, and it seems clear that he found it hard to find his feet—being out of sympathy with the more sanguinary elements in the city. His closest connections were with Girondin leaders in Paris, who were rapidly to fall from favour. Moreover, his plea in the National Convention for clemency for Louis XVI at his trial at the end of 1792, led to his denunciation by Marat and the enmity of the Jacobin faction. He served with Condorcet and Sieyes on the Committee to design a republican constitution, but the extent of his contribution is unclear, and although Condorcet pressed on with the work, producing a report in the spring of 1793, it was immediately shelved. Paine led an increasingly constrained life as the Jacobins assumed ascendancy and his friends were arrested and executed, fled, or killed themselves. Orders for his arrest were issued on 27 December 1793. While he was being taken into custody he passed to his American friend Joel Barlow the manuscript for the first part of Age of Reason which was published shortly thereafter. Paine spent eleven months in the Luxembourg (not unconnected to the studied neglect of his case by the US Minister, Gouvernor Morris), and seems only narrowly to have escaped the guillotine. When he left prison, after Robespierre’s execution, it was thanks to the intervention of Morris’s successor, James Monroe. On his release, Paine was in an extremely debilitated state, and Monroe looked after him in his home. Paine’s angry denunciation of Washington, whom he believed had ignored his pleas for help, and the publication of subsequent parts of Age of Reason made Monroe increasingly uncomfortable with his guest and Paine left to live with the printer Nicholas Bonneville and his family.