y of this dreadful saturnalia of assassination which was making
Paris a city of bloody mist. Men and women of the Girondist party came
to tell her of the hideous deeds that were perpetrated there. All these
horrors gradually wove themselves in the young girl's imagination around
the sinister and repulsive figure of Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing
of his associates, Danton and Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that
she saw the monster who sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who
reveled like some arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death.

In his earlier years Marat had been a very different figure--an
accomplished physician, the friend of nobles, a man of science and
original thought, so that he was nearly elected to the Academy of
Sciences. His studies in electricity gained for him the admiration
of Benjamin Franklin and the praise of Goethe. But when he turned to
politics he left all this career behind him. He plunged into the very
mire of red republicanism, and even there he was for a time so much
hated that he sought refuge in London to save his life.

On his return he was hunted by his enemies, so that his only place
of refuge was in the sewers and drains of Paris. A woman, one Simonne
Evrard, helped him to escape his pursuers. In the sewers, however,
he contracted a dreadful skin-disease from which he never afterward
recovered, and which was extremely painful as well as shocking to
behold.

It is small wonder that the stories about Marat circulated through the
provinces made him seem more a devil than a man. His vindictiveness
against the Girondists brought all of this straight home to Charlotte
Corday and led her to dream of acting the part of Brutus, so that she
might free her country from this hideous tyrant.

In January, 1793, King Louis XVI. met his death upon the scaffold; and
the queen was thrust into a foul prison. This was a signal for activity
among the Girondists in Normandy, and especially at Caen, where
Charlotte was present at their meetings and heard their fervid oratory.
There was a plot to march on Paris, yet in some instinctive way she felt
that such a scheme must fail. It was then that she definitely formed
the plan of going herself, alone, to the French capital to seek out the
hideous Marat and to kill him with her own hands.

To this end she made application for a passport allowing her to
visit Paris. This passport still exists, and it gives us an official
description of the girl