Thus ended, most sadly and prematurely, one of the most brilliant careers of the eighteenth century,--that of a man of splendid attainments, who lacked perhaps depth, and certainly application, to become one of the greatest men of his age and century; a man of noble, chivalrous character, who had placed his ideals of human greatness unfortunately in the splendid and brilliant outside of things instead of their solid, substantial and imperishable worth.
IN the letter of farewell which Charlotte Corday, from her prison cell as a doomed murderess, addressed to her father, she used the phrase (the French words are a well-known verse from a famous tragedy):
“’Tis not the scaffold, but the crime, that brings disgrace”;
for she still adhered to the belief that in killing Marat she had not committed a crime, but an act of patriotic devotion for which posterity would honor her, and history would place her name among the benefactors of mankind. In this belief she was more than half right, for in the long list of political crimes and assassinations there is not one which has been so willingly condoned by the world, so eloquently defended by historians, so enthusiastically immortalized by poets, and so leniently criticised even by moralists as that of Charlotte Corday. In her defence the law of heredity has been invoked, for it has been maintained that Charlotte Corday, who was a great-grandniece of the great Corneille, had inherited those sublime patriotic and republican sentiments which the great tragic poet so often and so eloquently expresses in his dramatic poems. In fact everything has been done to surround her crime with the halo of martyrdom, and to secure for her the glory of a national heroine.
It was in the middle of the year 1793. The French Revolution had reached that turning-point when the Revolutionists had almost exhausted their fury against the Royalists, and engaged in factional fights among themselves, always ending in the execution of the members of the vanquished party. The National Assembly--transformed into the National Convention--was under the absolute control of the Jacobins, and Marat, Danton and Robespierre were the absolute rulers of Paris and consequently of France. The King had been guillotined, the Queen and the other members of the royal family were imprisoned, and their execution was only a question of time. An insane craving for blood seemed to have taken possession of the men who were guiding the destinies of France. Danton, by far the most gifted of these Jacobins, had forever sullied his name as the author of the “September Massacres”; but far more odious was Marat, “the friend of the people,” the blood-thirsty demon of the Revolution, who quite seriously demanded, in the paper of which he was the editor and publisher, that two hundred thousand persons should be guillotined to purify the aristocratic atmosphere of France.