About eight o'clock on the Saturday morning she purchases a large sheath-knife in the Palais-Royal; then straightway, in the Place de Victoires, takes a hackney-coach. "To the Rue de l'Ecole de Médicine, No. 44." It is the residence of the Citoyen Marat! The Citoyen Marat is ill, and cannot be seen, which seems to disappoint her much. Her business is with Marat, then? Hapless, beautiful Charlotte—hapless, squalid Marat! From Caen in the utmost west, from Neuchâtel in the utmost east, they two are drawing nigh each other; they two have, very strangely, business together. Charlotte returning to her inn, despatches a short note to Marat, signifying that she is from Caen; that she desires earnestly to see him, and "will put it in his power to do France a great service." No answer. Charlotte writes another note, still more pressing; sets out with it by coach, about seven in the evening, herself.
It is yellow July evening, we say, the 13th of the month. Marat sits, about half-past seven of the clock, stewing in slipper-bath, sore, afflicted, ill of Revolution fever—of what other malady this history had rather not name. Excessively sick and worn, poor man; with precisely elevenpence-half-penny in paper; with slipper-bath, strong three-footed stool for writing on the while, and a squalid—washerwoman, one may call her; that is his civic establishment in Medical-School Street; thither and not elsewhither has his road led him. Not to the reign of brotherhood and perfect felicity; yet surely on the way towards that. Hark! a rap again! A musical woman's voice, refusing to be rejected: it is the citoyenne who would do France a service. Marat, recognising from within, cries—Admit her. Charlotte Corday is admitted.
"Citoyen Marat, I am from Caen, the seat of rebellion, and wished to speak with you." "Be seated, mon enfant. Now what are the traitors doing at Caen—what deputies are at Caen?" Charlotte names some deputies. "Their heads shall fall within a fortnight," croaks the eager people's friend, clutching his tablets to write: Barbaroux, Pétion, writes he, with bare, shrunk arm, turning aside in the bath; Pétion and Louvet, and—Charlotte has drawn her knife from the sheath; plunges it, with one sure stroke, into the writer's heart. "A moi, chère amie—Help, dear!" no more could the death-choked say or shriek. The helpful washerwoman running in—there is no friend of the people or friend of the washerwoman left; but his life with a groan gushes out, indignant, to the shades below.
On Wednesday evening, about half-past seven o'clock, from the gate of the Conciergerie, to a city all on tiptoe, the fatal cart issues; seated on it a fair young creature, sheeted in red smock of murderess; so beautiful, serene, so full of life; journeying towards death—alone amid the world. The executioners proceed to bind her feet; she resists, thinking it meant as an insult; on a word of explanation, she submits with cheerful apology. As the last act, all being now ready, they take the neckerchief from her neck; a blush of maidenly shame overspreads that fair face and neck; the cheeks were still tinged with it when the executioner lifted the severed head, to show it to the people. "It is most true," says Forster, "that he struck the cheek insultingly, for I saw it with my eyes."
MADAME DE STAEL.
[BORN 1766. DIED 1817.]
JEFFREY.
HE most powerful writer that her country has produced since the time of Voltaire and Rousseau, and the greatest writer, of a woman, that any time or any country has produced. Her taste perhaps is not quite pure, and her style is too irregular and ambitious. These faults may even go deeper. Her passion for effect, and the tone of exaggeration which it naturally produces, have probably interfered occasionally with the soundness of her judgment, and given a suspicious colouring to some of her representations of fact. At all events, they have rendered her impatient of the humbler task of completing her explanatory details, or stating in their order all the premises of her reasonings. She gives her history in abstracts, and her theories in aphorisms; and the greater part of her works, in place of presenting that systematic unity, from which the highest degrees of strength and beauty and clearness must ever be derived, may be fairly described as a collection of striking fragments, in which a great deal of repetition does by no means diminish the effect of a good deal of inconsistency. In those same works, however, whether we consider them as fragments or as systems, we do not hesitate to say that there are more of original and profound observations, more new images, greater sagacity, combined with higher imagination, and more of the true philosophy of the passions, the politics, and the literature of her contemporaries, than in any other author we can now remember.