The wedding party filed into a line of waiting carriages. But scarce had the joyous cavalcade set out on its short journey when it was halted by the passage of a truly horrible procession that just then emerged from a cross street; a procession made up of scarecrow men and women, hideous of visage, clad in rags, blood from the guillotine—around which they had lately gathered, gloating—spattered on their clothes and unwashed faces.
In the midst of the howling and huzzaing throng was a chair, carried by supports on the shoulders of eight half-naked sans-culottes. And in this lofty chair crouched the most hideous figure in all that vile gathering—a dwarfish, weirdly dressed man, his face disgustingly marred by disease, his eyes glaring with the light of madness.
Around him gamboled the mob, screaming blessings and adulations, strewing his bearers' way with masses of wilted flowers, filched from the halls.
Thus did Doctor Jean Paul Marat make his triumphal return home that April day from the Convention, escorted by his worshipers—and fellow beasts. Thus did his obscene retinue block the wedding procession of dainty little Jeanne Recamier. Jean Paul Marat—for whose shrunken chest, at that very moment, poor, politics-crazed Charlotte Corday was sharpening the twenty-eight-cent case knife she had just bought.
An odd omen for the outset of married life; and vitally so to the little new-wed Recamier girl, who had been brought up amid superstitions.
Shall we glance at a short word picture of Jeanne, limned by a contemporary?
"She has orange-tinted eyes, but they are without fire; pretty and transparent teeth, but incapable of snapping; an ungainly waist; coarse hands and feet; and complexion that is a bowl of milk wherein float rose leaves."
Let me add to the sketch the established fact that, during the seventy-one years of her life, no man so such as boasted that he had received a caress or a love word from her. But don't lose interest in her, please, on that account. Dozens of men would blithely have tossed away their souls for the privilege of making that boast truthfully. Failing, they nicknamed her "the angel of the frozen heart." Against her, alone, perhaps of all super-women, no word of scandal was ever breathed. (Chiefly, it has been claimed, for physical reasons.)
Let me touch, as briefly as I can, on a story at which Madame Lenormand, her own cousin, broadly hints and which Turquan openly declares true. Says the former, among other and closer comments on the theme:
"Madame Recamier received from her husband but his name. His affection was paternal. He treated as a daughter the woman who carried his name."