army with which to deliver Paris from the foul clutches of the
Jacobins. An anguished spectator of this failure, she saw in it a sign
that Liberty was being strangled at its birth. On the lips of her
friends the Girondins she caught again the name of Marat, the murderer
of Liberty; and, brooding, she reached a conclusion embodied in a
phrase of a letter which she wrote about that time.
“As long as Marat lives there will never be any safety for the friends
of law and humanity.”
From that negative conclusion to its positive, logical equivalent it
was but a step. That step she took. She may have considered awhile the
proposition thus presented to her, or resolve may have come to her with
realization. She understood that a great sacrifice was necessary; that
who undertook to rid France of that unclean monster must go prepared
for self-immolation. She counted the cost calmly and soberly—for calm
and sober was now her every act.
She made her packages, and set out one morning by the Paris coach from
Caen, leaving a note for her father, in which she had written:
“I am going to England, because I do not believe that it will be
possible for a long time to live happily and tranquilly in France. On
leaving I post this letter to you. When you receive it I shall no
longer be here. Heaven denied us the happiness of living together, as
it has denied us other happinesses. May it show itself more clement to
our country. Good-by, dear Father. Embrace my sister for me, and do not
forget me.”
That was all. The fiction that she was going to England was intended to
save him pain. For she had so laid her plans that her identity should
remain undisclosed. She would seek Marat in the very Hall of the
Convention, and publicly slay him in his seat. Thus Paris should behold
Nemesis overtaking the false Republican in the very Assembly which he
corrupted, and anon should adduce a moral from the spectacle of the
monster’s death. For herself she counted upon instant destruction at
the hands of the furious spectators. Thus, thinking to die
unidentified, she trusted that her father, hearing, as all France must
hear, the great tidings that Marat was dead, would never connect her
with the instrument of Fate shattered by the fury of the mob.
You realize, then, how great and how terrible was the purpose of this
maid of twenty-five, who so demurely took her seat in the Paris
diligence on that July morning of the Year 2 of the Republic—1793, old
style. She was becomingly dressed in brown cloth, a lace fichu folded
across her well-developed breast, a conical hat above her light brown
hair. She was of a good height and finely proportioned, and her
carriage as full of dignity as of grace. Her skin was of such white
loveliness that a contemporary compares it with the lily. Like Athene,
she was gray-eyed, and, like Athene, noble-featured, the oval of her
face squaring a little at the chin, in which there was a cleft. Calm
was her habit, calm her slow-moving eyes, calm and deliberate her
movements, and calm the mind reflected in all this.
And as the heavy diligence trundles out of Caen and takes the open
country and the Paris road, not even the thought of the errand upon
which she goes, of her death-dealing and death-receiving mission, can
shake that normal calm. Here is no wild exaltation, no hysterical
obedience to hotly-conceived impulse. Here is purpose, as cold as it is
lofty, to liberate France and pay with her life for the privilege of
doing so.
That lover of hers, whom we are presently to see, has compared her
ineptly with Joan of Arc, that other maid of France. But Joan moved
with pomp in a gorgeous pageantry, amid acclamations, sustained by the
heady wine of combat and of enthusiasm openly indulged, towards a goal
of triumph. Charlotte travelled quietly in the stuffy diligence with
the quiet conviction that her days were numbered.
So normal did she appear to her travelling companions, that one among
them, with an eye for beauty, pestered her with amorous attentions, and
actually proposed marriage to her before the coach had rolled over the
bridge of Neuilly into Paris two days later.
She repaired to the Providence Inn in the Rue des Vieux Augustine,
where she engaged a room on the first floor, and then she set out in
quest of the Deputy Duperret. She had a letter of introduction to him
from the Girondin Barbaroux, with whom she had been on friendly terms
at Caen. Duperret was to assist her to obtain an interview with the
Minister of the Interior. She had undertaken to see the latter on the
subject of certain papers relating to the affairs of a nun of Caen, an
old convent friend of her own, and she was in haste to discharge this
errand, so as to be free for the great task upon which she was come.
From inquiries that she made, she learnt at once that Marat was ill,
and confined to his house. This rendered necessary a change of plans,
and the relinquishing of her project of affording him a spectacular
death in the crowded hall of the Convention.
The next day, which was Friday, she devoted to furthering the business
of her friend the nun. On Saturday morning she rose early, and by six
o’clock she was walking in the cool gardens of the Palais Royal,
considering with that almost unnatural calm of hers the ways and means
of accomplishing her purpose in the unexpected conditions that she
found.
Towards eight o’clock, when Paris was awakening to the business of the
day and taking down its shutters, she entered a cutler’s shop in the
Palais Royal, and bought for two francs a stout kitchen knife in a
shagreen case. She then returned to her hotel to breakfast, and
afterwards, dressed in her brown travelling-gown and conical hat, she
went forth again, and, hailing a hackney carriage, drove to Marat’s
house in the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine.
But admittance to that squalid dwelling was denied her. The Citizen
Marat was ill, she was told, and could receive no visitors. It was
Simonne Everard, the triumvir’s mistress—later to be known as the Widow
Marat—who barred her ingress with this message.
Checked, she drove back to the Providence Inn and wrote a letter to the
triumvir:
“_Paris, 13th July, Year 2 of the Republic_.
“Citizen,—I have arrived from Caen. Your love for your country leads me
to assume that you will be anxious to hear of the unfortunate events
which are taking place in that part of the Republic. I shall therefore
call upon you towards one o’clock. Have the kindness to receive me, and
accord me a moment’s audience. I shall put you in the way of rendering
a great service to France.
“Marie Corday.”
Having dispatched that letter to Marat, she sat until late afternoon
waiting vainly for an answer. Despairing at last of receiving any, she
wrote a second note, more peremptory in tone:
“I wrote to you this morning, Marat. Have you received my letter? May I
hope for a moment’s audience? If you have received my letter, I hope
you will not refuse me, considering the importance of the matter. It
should suffice for you that I am very unfortunate to give me the right
to your protection.”
Having changed into a gray-striped dimity gown—you observe this further
manifestation of a calm so complete that it admits of no departure from
the ordinary habits of life—she goes forth to deliver in person this
second letter, the knife concealed in the folds of the muslin fichu
crossed high upon her breast.
In a mean, brick-paved, ill-lighted, and almost unfurnished room of
that house in the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, the People’s Friend is
seated in a bath. It is no instinct of cleanliness he is obeying, for
in all France there is no man more filthy in his person and his habits
than this triumvir. His bath is medicated. The horrible, loathsome
disease that corrodes his flesh demands these long immersions to quiet
the gnawing pains which distract his active, restless mind. In these
baths he can benumb the torment of the body with which he is
encumbered.
For Marat is an intellect, and nothing more—leastways, nothing more
that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs and organs
he has neglected until it has all fallen into decay. His very lack of
personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he lives, the insufficient
sleep which he allows himself, his habit of careless feeding at
irregular intervals, all have their source in his contempt for the
physical part of him. This talented man of varied attainments,
accomplished linguist, skilled physician, able naturalist and profound
psychologist, lives in his intellect alone, impatient of all physical
interruptions. If he consents to these immersions, if he spends whole
days seated in this medicated bath, it is solely because it quenches or
cools the fires that are devouring him, and thus permits him to bend
his mind to the work that is his life. But his long-suffering body is
avenging upon the mind the neglect to which it has been submitted. The
morbid condition of the former is being communicated to the latter,
whence results that disconcerting admixture of cold, cynical cruelty
and exalted sensibility which marked his nature in the closing years of
his life.
In his bath, then, sat the People’s Friend on that July evening,
immersed to the hips, his head swathed in a filthy turban, his
emaciated body cased in a sleeveless waistcoat. He is fifty years of
age, dying of consumption and other things, so that, did Charlotte but
know it, there is no need to murder him. Disease and Death have marked
him for their own, and grow impatient.
A board covering the bath served him for writing-table; an empty wooden
box at his side bore an inkstand, some pens, sheets of paper, and two
or three copies of L’Ami do Peuple. There was no sound in the room but
the scratch and splutter of his quill. He was writing diligently,
revising and editing a proof of the forthcoming issue of his paper.
A noise of voices raised in the outer room invaded the quiet in which
he was at work, and gradually penetrated his absorption, until it
disturbed and irritated him. He moved restlessly in his bath, listened
a moment, then, with intent to make an end of the interruption, he
raised a hoarse, croaking voice to inquire what might be taking place.
The door opened, and Simonne, his mistress and household drudge,
entered the room. She was fully twenty years younger than himself, and
under the slattern appearance which life in that house had imposed upon
her there were vestiges of a certain comeliness.
“There is a young woman here from Caen, who demands insistently to see
you upon a matter of national importance.”
The dull eyes kindle at the mention of Caen; interest quickens in that
leaden-hued countenance. Was it not in Caen that those old foes of his,
the Girondins, were stirring up rebellion?
“She says,” Simonne continued, “that she wrote a letter to you this
morning, and she brings you a second note herself. I have told her that
you will not receive anyone, and...”
“Give me the note,” he snapped. Setting down his pen, he thrust out an
unclean paw to snatch the folded sheet from Simonne’s hand. He spread
it, and read, his bloodless lips compressed, his eyes narrowing to
slits.
“Let her in,” he commanded sharply, and Simonne obeyed him without more
ado. She admitted Charlotte, and left them alone together—the avenger
and her victim. For a moment each regarded the other. Marat beheld a
handsome young woman, elegantly attired. But these things had no
interest for the People’s Friend. What to him was woman and the lure of
beauty? Charlotte beheld a feeble man of a repulsive hideousness, and
was full satisfied, for in this outward loathsomeness she imagined a
confirmation of the vileness of the mind she was come to blot out.
Then Marat spoke. “So you are from Caen, child?” he said. “And what is
doing in Caen that makes you so anxious to see me?”
She approached him.
“Rebellion is stirring there, Citizen Marat.”
“Rebellion, ha!” It was a sound between a laugh and a croak. “Tell me
what deputies are sheltered in Caen. Come, child, their names.” He took
up and dipped his quill, and drew a sheet of paper towards him.
She approached still nearer; she came to stand close beside him, erect
and calm. She recited the names of her friends, the Girondins, whilst
hunched there in his bath his pen scratched briskly.
“So many for the guillotine,” he snarled, when it was done.
But whilst he was writing, she had drawn the knife from her fichu, and
as he uttered those words of doom to others his own doom descended upon
him in a lightning stroke. Straight driven by that strong young arm,
the long, stout blade was buried to its black hilt in his breast.
He looked at her with eyes in which there was a faint surprise as he
sank back. Then he raised his voice for the last time.
“Help, chére amie! Help!” he cried, and was for ever silent.
The hand still grasping the pen trailed on the ground beside the bath
at the end of his long, emaciated arm. His body sank sideways in the
same direction, the head lolling nervelessly upon his right shoulder,
whilst from the great rent in his breast the blood gushed forth,
embruing the water of his bath, trickling to the brick-paved floor,
bespattering—symbolically almost—a copy of L’Ami du Peuple, the journal
to which he had devoted so much of his uneasy life.
In answer to that cry of his came now Simonne in haste. A glance
sufficed to reveal to her the horrible event, and, like a tigress, she
sprang upon the unresisting slayer, seizing her by the head, and
calling loudly the while for assistance. Came instantly from the
anteroom Jeanne, the old cook, the Fortress of the house, and Laurent
Basse, a folder of Marat’s paper; and now Charlotte found herself
confronted by four maddened, vociferous beings, at whose hands she may
well have expected to receive the death for which she was prepared.
Laurent, indeed, snatched up a chair, and felled her by a blow of it
across her head. He would, no doubt, have proceeded in his fury to have
battered her to death, but for the arrival of _gens d’armes_ and the
police commissioner of the district, who took her in their protecting
charge.
The soul of Paris was convulsed by the tragedy when it became known.
All night terror and confusion were abroad. All night the revolutionary
rabble, in angry grief, surged about and kept watch upon the house
wherein the People’s Friend lay dead.
That night, and for two days and nights thereafter, Charlotte Corday
lay in the Prison of the Abbaye, supporting with fortitude the
indignities that for a woman were almost inseparable from revolutionary
incarceration. She preserved throughout her imperturbable calm, based
now upon a state of mind content in the contemplation of accomplished
purpose, duty done. She had saved France, she believed; saved Liberty,
by slaying the man who would have strangled it. In that illusion she
was content. Her own life was a small price to pay for the splendid
achievement.
Some of her time of waiting she spent in writing letters to her
friends, in which tranquilly and sanely she dwelt upon what she had
done, expounding fully the motives that had impelled her, dwelling upon
the details of the execution, and of all that had followed. Among the
letters written by her during those “days of the preparation of peace
“—as she calls that period, dating in such terms a long epistle to
Barbaroux—was one to the Committee of Public Safety, in which she begs
that a miniature-painter may be sent to her to paint her portrait, so
that she may leave this token of remembrance to her friends. It is only
in this, as the end approaches, that we see in her conduct any thought
for her own self, any suggestion that she is anything more than a
instrument in the hands of Fate.
On the 15th, at eight o’clock in the morning, her trial began before
the Revolutionary Tribunal. A murmur ran through the hall as she
appeared in her gown of grey-striped dimity, composed and calm—always
calm.
The trial opened with the examination of witnesses; into that of the
cutler, who had sold her the knife, she broke impatiently.
“These details are a waste of time. It is I who killed Marat.”
The audience gasped, and rumbled ominously. Montane turned to examine
her.
“What was the object of your visit to Paris?” he asks.
“To kill Marat.”
“What motives induced you to this horrible deed?”
“His many crimes.”
“Of what crimes do you accuse him?”
“That he instigated the massacre of September; that he kept alive the
fires of civil war, so that he might be elected dictator; that he
sought to infringe upon the sovereignty of the People by causing the
arrest and imprisonment of the deputies to the Convention on May 31st.”
“What proof have you of this?”
“The future will afford the proof. Marat hid his designs behind a mask
of patriotism.”
Montane shifted the ground of his interrogatory.
“Who were your accomplices in this atrocious act?”
“I have none.”
Montane shook his head. “You cannot convince anyone that a person of
your age and sex could have conceived such a crime unless instigated by
some person or persons whom you are unwilling to name.”
Charlotte almost smiled. “That shows but a poor knowledge of the human
heart. It is easier to carry out such a project upon the strength of
one’s own hatred than upon that of others.” And then, raising her
voice, she proclaimed: “I killed one man to save a hundred thousand; I
killed a villain to save innocents; I killed a savage wild-beast to
give repose to France. I was a Republican before the Revolution. I
never lacked for energy.”
What more was there to say? Her guilt was completely established. Her
fearless self-obssession was not to be ruffled. Yet Fouquier-Tinville,
the dread prosecutor, made the attempt. Beholding her so virginal and
fair and brave, feeling perhaps that the Tribunal had not had the best
of it, he sought with a handful of revolutionary filth to restore the
balance. He rose slowly, his ferrety eyes upon her.
“How many children have you had?” he rasped, sardonic, his tone a slur,
an insult.
Faintly her cheeks crimsoned. But her voice was composed, disdainful,
as she answered coldly:
“Have I not stated that I am not married?”
A leer, a dry laugh, a shrug from Tinville to complete the impression
he sought to convey, and he sat down again.
It was the turn of Chauveau de la Garde, the advocate instructed to
defend her. But what defence was possible? And Chauveau had been
intimidated. He had received a note from the jury ordering him to
remain silent, another from the President bidding him declare her mad.
Yet Chauveau took a middle course. His brief speech is admirable; it
satisfied his self-respect, without derogating from his client. It
uttered the whole truth.
“The prisoner,” he said, “confesses with calm the horrible crime she
has committed; she confesses with calm its premeditation; she confesses
its most dreadful details; in short, she confesses everything, and does
not seek to justify herself. That, citizens of the jury, is her whole
defence. This imperturbable calm, this utter abnegation of self, which
displays no remorse even in the very presence of death, are contrary to
nature. They can only be explained by the excitement of political
fanaticism which armed her hand. It is for you, citizens of the jury,
to judge what weight that moral consideration should have in the scales
of justice.”
The jury voted her guilty, and Tinville rose to demand the full
sentence of the law.
It was the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the antechamber of
the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent to her, but she
dismissed him with thanks, not requiring his ministrations. She
preferred the painter Hauer, who had received the Revolutionary
Tribunal’s permission to paint her portrait in accordance with her
request. And during the sitting, which lasted half an hour, she
conversed with him quietly on ordinary topics, the tranquillity of her
spirit unruffled by any fear of the death that was so swiftly
approaching.
The door opened, and Sanson, the public executioner, came in. He
carried the red smock worn by those convicted of assassination. She
showed no dismay; no more, indeed, than a faint surprise that the time
spent with Hauer should have gone so quickly. She begged for a few
moments in which to write a note, and, the request being granted,
acquitted herself briskly of that task, then announcing herself ready,
she removed her cap that Sanson might cut her luxuriant hair. Yet
first, taking his scissors, she herself cut off a lock and gave it to
Hauer for remembrance. When Sanson would have bound her hands, she
begged that she might be allowed to wear gloves, as her wrists were
bruised and cut by the cord with which she had been pinioned in Marat’s
house. He answered that she might do so if she wished, but that it was
unnecessary, as he could bind her without causing pain.
“To be sure,” she said, “those others had not your experience,” and she
proffered her bare wrists to his cord without further demur. “If this
toilet of death is performed by rude hands,” she commented, “at least
it leads to immortality.”
She mounted the tumbril awaiting in the prison yard, and, disdaining
the chair offered her by Sanson, remained standing, to show herself
dauntless to the mob and brave its rage. And fierce was that rage,
indeed. So densely thronged were the streets that the tumbril proceeded
at a crawl, and the people surging about the cart screamed death and
insult at the doomed woman. It took two hours to reach the Place de la
Révolution, and meanwhile a terrific summer thunderstorm had broken
over Paris, and a torrential rain had descended upon the densely packed
streets. Charlotte’s garments were soaked through and through, so that
her red smock, becoming glued now to her body and fitting her like a
skin, threw into relief its sculptural beauty, whilst a reflection of
the vivid crimson of the garment faintly tinged her cheeks, and thus
heightened her appearance of complete composure.
And it is now in the Rue St. Honoré that at long last we reach the
opening of our tragic love-story.
A tall, slim, fair young man, named Adam Lux—sent to Paris by the city
of Mayence as Deputy Extraordinary to the National Convention—was
standing there in the howling press of spectators. He was an
accomplished, learned young gentleman, doctor at once of philosophy and
of medicine, although in the latter capacity he had never practiced
owing to an extreme sensibility of nature, which rendered anatomical
work repugnant to him. He was a man of a rather exalted imagination,
unhappily married—the not uncommon fate of such delicate
temperaments—and now living apart from his wife. He had heard, as all
Paris had heard, every detail of the affair, and of the trial, and he
waited there, curious to see this woman, with whose deed he was
secretly in sympathy.
The tumbril slowly approached, the groans and execrations swelled up
around him, and at last he beheld her—beautiful, serene, full of life,
a still smile upon her lips. For a long moment he gazed upon her,
standing as if stricken into stone. Then heedless of those about him,
he bared his head, and thus silently saluted and paid homage to her.
She did not see him. He had not thought that she would. He saluted her
as the devout salute the unresponsive image of a saint. The tumbril
crawled on. He turned his head, and followed her with his eyes for
awhile; then, driving his elbows into the ribs of those about him, he
clove himself a passage through the throng, and so followed,
bare-headed now, with fixed gaze, a man entranced.
He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the last he
had seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable calm, and in the
hush that followed the sibilant fall of the great knife his voice
suddenly rang out.
“She is greater than Brutus!” was his cry; and he added, addressing
those who stared at him in stupefaction: “It were beautiful to have
died with her!”
He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at that
moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner’s attendant,
who, in holding up Charlotte’s truncated head, slapped the cheek with
his hand. The story runs that the dead face reddened under the blow.
Scientists of the day disputed over this, some arguing from it a proof
that consciousness does not at once depart the brain upon decapitation.