It seems to be certain that he organized, if he did not originate, the frightful September massacres. There were many hundreds of Royalists in the prisons, who were becoming a nuisance. The Revolution was hanging fire, and well-meaning enthusiasts began to fear that the dull clod of a populace would not rise in its might to end the aristocracy; so it was decided to abolish these unfortunate prisoners. A tribunal was formed to sit in judgment; outside waited a great crowd of murderers hired for the occasion. The prisoners were led before the tribunal, and released into the street, where they were received by the murderers and were duly “released”—from this sorrowful world. The most famous victim was the good and gentle Princess de Lamballe, Superintendent of the Queen’s Household. The judge at her trial was the notorious Hébert, anarchist, atheist, and savage, afterwards executed by his friend Robespierre when he had served his turn. Madame collapsed with terror, and fainted repeatedly during the mockery of a trial, but when Hébert said the usual ironical, “Let Madame be released,” she walked to the door. When she saw the murderers with their bloody swords she shrank back and shrieked, “Fi—horreur.” They cut her in pieces; but decency forbids that I should say what they did with all the pieces. Carlyle, who here speaks truth, has a dark saying about “obscene horrors with moustachio grands-levres,” which is near enough for anatomists to understand. The murderers then stuck her head on a pike, and held her fair curls before the Queen’s window as an oriflamme in the name of Liberty. Madame was but one of 1,100 whose insane butchery must be laid to the door of Marat; though some friends of the Bolsheviks endeavour to acquit him we can only say that if it was not his work it looks uncommonly like it.

The battle between the Girondins, who were bad fellows, but less bad than their enemies of the “Mountain”—Robespierre, Danton, and Marat—continued; it was a case of arcades ambo, which Bryon translates “blackguards both,” though Virgil, who wrote the line—in the Georgics—probably meant something much coarser. The “Mountain” began to get the upper hand, and the Girondins fled for their lives, or went to the guillotine. The Revolution was already “devouring its children.”

At Caen in Normandy there lived a young woman, daughter of a decayed noble family which in happier days had been named d’Armont, now Corday. Her name was Marie Charlotte d’Armont, and she is known to history as Charlotte Corday. She had been well educated, had read Rousseau, Voltaire, and the encyclopædists, besides being fascinated by a dream of an imaginary State which she had been taught to call the Roman Republic, in which the “tyrannicide” Brutus loomed much larger and more glorious than in reality. Some Girondists fled to Caen to escape the vengeance of Marat; Charlotte, horrified, resolved that the monster should die; she herself was then nearly twenty-five years of age. I have a picture of her which seems to fit in very well with one’s preconceived ideas of her character. She was five feet one inch in height, with a well-proportioned figure, and she had a wonderful mass of chestnut hair; her eyes were large, grey, and set widely apart; the general expression of her face was thoughtful and earnest. Perhaps it would hardly be respectful to call her an “intense” young lady; but there was a young lady who sometimes used to consult me who might very well have sat for the portrait; she possessed a type of somewhat—dare I say?—priggish neurosis which I imagine was not unlike the type of character that dwelt within Charlotte Corday—extreme conscientiousness and self-righteousness. Such a face might have been the face of a Christian martyr going to the lions—if any Christian martyrs were ever thrown to the lions, which some doubt. She went silently to Paris, attended only by an aged man-servant, and bought a long knife in the Palais Royal; thence she went to Marat’s house, and tried to procure admission. Simonne—the loyal Simonne—denied her, and she returned to her inn. Again she called at the house; Marat heard her pretty voice, and ordered Simonne to admit her. It was the evening of July 13, four years all but one day since the storming of the Bastille, and Marat sat in his slipper-bath, pens, ink, and paper before him, frightful head peering out of the opening, hot compresses concealing his hair. Charlotte told him that there were several Girondists hiding at Caen and plotting against the Revolution. “Their heads shall fall within a fortnight,” croaked Marat. Then, he being thus convicted out of his own mouth, she drew forth from her bosom her long knife, and plunged it into his chest between the first and second ribs, so that it pierced the aorta. Marat gave one cry, and died; Charlotte turned to face the two women who rushed in, but not yet was she to surrender, for she barricaded herself behind some furniture and other movables till the soldiers arrived. To them she gave herself up without trouble.

At her trial she made no denial, but proudly confessed, saying, “Yes, I killed him.” Fouquier-Tinville sneered at her: “You must be well practised at this sort of crime!” She only answered: “The monster!—he seems to think I am an assassin!” She thought herself rather the agent of God, sent by Him to rid the world of a loathsome disorder, as Brutus had rid Rome of Julius Cæsar.

In due course she was guillotined, and an extraordinary thing happened. A young German named Adam Lux had been present at the trial, standing behind the artist who was painting the very picture of which I have a reproduction—it is said that Charlotte showed no objection to being portrayed—and the young man had been fascinated by the martyresque air of her. He attended the execution, romance and grief weighing him down; then he ran home, and wrote a furious onslaught on the leaders of the Mountain who had executed her, saying that her death had “sanctified the guillotine,” and that it had become “a sacred altar from which every taint had been removed by her innocent blood.” He published this broadcast, and was naturally at once arrested. The revolutionary tribunal sentenced him to death, and he scornfully refused to accept a pardon, saying that he wished to die on the same spot as Charlotte, so they let him have his wish. The incident reminds one of a picture-show, and it is not remarkable that an American, named Lyndsay Orr, has written a sentimental article about it.

The people of Paris went mad after Marat’s death; his body, which was said to be decaying with unusual rapidity, was surrounded by a great crowd which worshipped it blasphemously, saying, “O Sacred Heart of Marat!” This worship of Marat, which showed how deeply his teaching had bitten into the hearts of the people, culminated in the Reign of Terror, which began on September 5, 1795, whereby France lost, according to different estimates, between half a million and a million innocent people. Some superior persons seem to think that Marat had little or no influence on the Revolution, but to my mind there can be no doubt that the Terror was largely the result of his preaching of frantic violence, and it is a lesson that we ourselves should take to heart, seeing that there are persons in the world to-day who would emulate Marat if they possessed his enormous courage.

I need not narrate the history of the Reign of Terror, which was even worse than the terror which the Bolsheviks established in Russia. Not even Lenin and Trotsky devised anything so atrocious as the noyades—wholesale drownings—in the Loire, or the mariages républicains on the banks of that river, and it is difficult to believe that the teaching of Marat had nothing to do with that frightful outbreak of bestiality, lust, and murder.

The evil that men do lives after them. There was little good to be buried in Marat’s grave, doctor though he was.

Napoleon I

THERE is not, and may possibly never be, an adequate biography of this prodigious man. It is a truism to say that he has cast a doubt on all past glory; let us hope that he has rendered future glory impossible, for to judge by the late war it seems impossible that any rival to the glory of Napoleon can ever arise. In the matter of slaying his fellow-creatures he appears to have reached the summit of human achievement; possibly also in all matters of organization and administration. Material things hardly seemed to affect him; bestriding the world like a colossus he has given us a sublime instance of Intellect that for many years ruthlessly overmastered Circumstance. That Intellect was finally itself mastered by disease, leaving behind it a record which is of supreme interest to mankind; a record which, alas, is so disfigured by prejudice and falsehood that it is difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is untrue. Napoleon himself possessed so extraordinary a personality that nearly every one whom he met became a fervent adorer. With regard to him we can find no half-tones, no detached reporters; therefore it is enormously difficult to find even the basis for a biography. Fortunately, that is not now our province. It is merely necessary that we shall attempt to make a consistent story of the reports of illness which perplex us in regard to his life and death; it adds interest to the quest when we are told that sometimes disease lent its aid to Fate in swaying the destinies of battles. And yet, even after Napoleon has lived, there are some historians who deny the influence of a “great man” upon history, and would attribute to “tendencies” and “ideas” events which ordinary people would attribute to individual genius. Some persons think that Napoleon was merely an episode—that he had no real influence upon history; it is the custom to point to his career as an exemplification of the thesis that war has played very little real part in the moulding of the course of the world. Into all this we need not now enter, beyond saying that he was the “child of the French Revolution” who killed his own spiritual father; the reaction from Napoleon was Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Holy Alliance; the reaction from these forces of repression was the late war. So it is difficult to agree that Napoleon was only an “episode.” We have merely to remark that he was the most interesting of all men, and, so far as we can tell, will probably remain so. As Fielding long ago pointed out in Jonathan Wild, a man’s “greatness” appears to depend on his homicidal capacity. To make yourself a hero all you have to do is to slaughter as many of your fellow-creatures as God will permit. How poor the figures of Woodrow Wilson or Judge Hughes seem beside the grey-coated “little corporal”! Though it is quite probable that either of these most estimable American peacemakers have done more good for the human race than was achieved by any warrior! So sinful is man that we throw our hats in the air and whoop for Napoleon the slaughterer, rather than for Woodrow Wilson, who was “too proud to fight.”