That man was Jean Paul Marat, sometime medical practitioner, sometime professor of literature, a graduate of the Scottish University of St. Andrews, author of some scientific and many sociological works, inveterate pamphleteer and revolutionary journalist, proprietor and editor of L'Ami du Peuple, and idol of the Parisian rabble, who had bestowed upon him the name borne by his gazette, so that he was known as The People's Friend.
Such was the foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured, their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine in Paris he span with his clever, wicked pen a web that paralysed their high endeavours and threatened finally to choke them.
He was not alone, of course. He was one of the dread triumvirate in which Danton and Robespierre were his associates. But to the Girondins he appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and implacable of the three, whilst to Charlotte Corday—the friend and associate now of the proscribed Girondins who had sought refuge in Caen—he loomed so vast and terrible as to eclipse his associates entirely. To her young mind, inflamed with enthusiasm for the religion of Liberty as preached by the Girondins, Marat was a loathly, dangerous heresiarch, threatening to corrupt that sublime new faith with false, anarchical doctrine, and to replace the tyranny that had been overthrown by a tyranny more odious still.
She witnessed in Caen the failure of the Girondin attempt to raise an 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 carnage, 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: