CHARLOTTE CORDAY.

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BY JULIA KAVANAGH.

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Amongst the women of the French Revolution, there is one who stands essentially apart: a solitary episode of the eventful story. She appears for a moment, performs a deed—heroic as to the intention, criminal as to the means—and disappears for ever; lost in the shadow of time—an unfathomed mystery.

And it is, perhaps, this very mystery that has invested with so much interest the name of one known by a single deed; which, though intended by her to deliver her country, changed little in its destinies. To admire her entirely is impossible; to condemn her is equally difficult. No one can read her history without feeling that, to judge her absolutely, lies not in the province of man. Beautiful, pure, gentle, and a murderess, she attracts and repels us in almost equal degrees; like all those beings whose nature is inexplicable and strange, according to the ordinary standard of humanity. Although it is generally acknowledged that site did not exercise over contemporary events that repressing power for which she sacrificed her life, it is felt, nevertheless, that no history of the times in which she lived, is complete without her name; and to her brief and tragic history an eloquent modern historian [^[12]] has devoted some of his most impressive pages.

The 31st of May was the signal of the fall and dispersion of the Girondists. Some, like Barbaroux, Buzot, Louvet, and their friends, retired to the provinces, which they endeavored to rouse for one last struggle. Others, like Madame Roland and the twenty-two, prepared themselves in their silent prison solitude for death and the scaffold. The name of the Girondists now became a sound as proscribed as that of Royalist had been during their brief sway. No voice gifted with power was raised throughout the republic in favor of the men by whom, in the midst of such enthusiastic acclamations, that republic had been founded. France was rapidly sinking into that state of silent apathy which foreboded the Reign of Terror: discouraged by their experience of the past, men lost their faith in humanity, and selfishly despaired of the future. A maiden’s heroic spirit alone conceived the daring project of saving those who had so long and so nobly striven for freedom; or, if this might not be, of avenging their fall, and striking terror into the hearts of their foes, by a deed of solemn immolation, worthy of the stern sacrifices of paganism, offered of yore on the blood-stained shrines of the goddess Nemesis.