y that she understood them very fully.

More to her taste was a copy of Plutarch's Lives. These famous stories
fascinated her. They told her of battle and siege, of intrigue and
heroism, and of that romantic love of country which led men to throw
away their lives for the sake of a whole people. Brutus and Regulus
were her heroes. To die for the many seemed to her the most glorious
end that any one could seek. When she thought of it she thrilled with a
sort of ecstasy, and longed with all the passion of her nature that
such a glorious fate might be her own.

Charlotte had nearly come to womanhood at the time when the French
Revolution first broke out. Royalist though she had been in her
sympathies, she felt the justice of the people's cause. She had seen
the suffering of the peasantry, the brutality of the tax-gatherers, and
all the oppression of the old regime. But what she hoped for was a
democracy of order and equality and peace. Could the king reign as a
constitutional monarch rather than as a despot, this was all for which
she cared.

In Normandy, where she lived, were many of those moderate republicans
known as Girondists, who felt as she did and who hoped for the same
peaceful end to the great outbreak. On the other hand, in Paris, the
party of the Mountain, as it was called, ruled with a savage violence
that soon was to culminate in the Reign of Terror. Already the
guillotine ran red with noble blood. Already the king had bowed his
head to the fatal knife. Already the threat had gone forth that a mere
breath of suspicion or a pointed finger might be enough to lead men and
women to a gory death.

In her quiet home near Caen Charlotte Corday heard as from afar the
story 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
Sci