Charlotte perceived that to call on Marat was the only means by which she might accomplish her purpose. She did so on the morning of the 13th of July, having first purchased a knife in the Palais Royal, and written him a note, in which she requested an interview. She was refused admittance. She then wrote him a second note, more pressing than the first, and in which she represented herself as persecuted for the cause of freedom. Without waiting to see what effect this note might produce, she called again at half-past seven the same evening.
Marat then resided in the Rue des Cordeliers, in a gloomy-looking house, which has since been demolished. His constant fears of assassination were shared by those around him; the porter, seeing a strange woman pass by his lodge without pausing to make any inquiry, ran out and called her back. She did not heed his remonstrance, but swiftly ascended the old stone stair-case, until she had reached the door of Marat’s apartment. It was cautiously opened by Albertine, a woman with whom Marat cohabited, and who passed for his wife. Recognizing the same young and handsome girl who had already called on her husband, and animated, perhaps, by a feeling of jealous mistrust, Albertine refused to admit her: Charlotte insisted with great earnestness. The sound of their altercation reached Marat; he immediately ordered his wife to admit the stranger, whom he recognized as the author of the two letters he had received in the course of the day. Albertine obeyed reluctantly; she allowed Charlotte to enter; and, after crossing with her an antechamber, where she had been occupied with a man named Laurent Basse, in folding some numbers of the “Ami du People,” she ushered her through two other rooms, until they came to a narrow closet, where Marat was then in a bath. He gave a look at Charlotte, and ordered his wife to leave them alone: she complied, but allowed the door of the closet to remain half open, and kept within call.
According to his usual custom, Marat wore a soiled handkerchief bound round his head, increasing his natural hideousness. A coarse covering was thrown across his bath; a board, likewise placed transversely, supported his papers. Laying down his pen, he asked Charlotte the purport of her visit. The closet was so narrow that she touched the bath near which she stood. She gazed on him with ill-disguised horror and disgust, but answered as composedly as she could, that she had come from Caen, in order to give him correct intelligence concerning the proceedings of the Girondists there. He listened, questioned her eagerly, wrote down the name of the Girondists, then added with a smile of triumph—
“Before a week, they shall have perished on the guillotine.”
“These words,” afterward said Charlotte, “sealed his fate.” Drawing from beneath the handkerchief which covered her bosom, the knife she had kept there all along, she plunged it to the hilt in Marat’s heart. He gave one loud expiring cry for help, and sank back dead in the bath. By an instinctive impulse, Charlotte had instantly drawn out the knife from the breast of her victim, but she did not strike again; casting it down at his feet, she left the closet and sat down in a neighboring room, thoughtfully passing her hand across her brow: her task was done.
The wife of Marat had rushed to his aid, on hearing his cry for help. Laurent Basse, seeing that all was over, turned round toward Charlotte, and with a blow of a chair felled her to the floor, whilst the infuriated Albertine trampled her under her feet. The tumult aroused the other tenants of the house; the alarm spread, and a crowd gathered in the apartment, who learned with stupor that Marat, the Friend of the People, had been murdered. Deeper still was their wonder when they gazed on the murderess. She stood there before them with still disordered garments, and her disheveled hair, loosely bound by a broad green ribbon, falling around her; but so calm, so serenely lovely, that those who most abhorred her crime gazed on her with involuntary admiration.
“Was she then so beautiful?” was the question addressed many years afterward, to on old man, one of the few remaining witnesses of this scene.
“Beautiful!” he echoed enthusiastically, adding with the eternal regrets of old age: “Ay, there are none such now!”
The commissary of police began his interrogatory in the saloon of Marat’s apartment. She told him her name, how long she had been in Paris, confessed her crime, and recognized the knife with which it had been perpetrated. The sheath was found in her pocket, with a thimble, some thread, money, and her watch.
“What was your motive in assassinating Marat?” asked the commissary.