rs and skilled writers, and they might
have succeeded but that in Paris sat another man no less gifted, and
with surer knowledge of the temper of the proletariat, tirelessly
wielding a vitriolic pen, skilled in the art of inflaming the passions
of the mob.

That man was Jean Paul Marat, sometime medical practitioner, sometime
professor of literature, a graduate of the Scottish University of
St. Andrews, author of some scientific and many sociological works,
inveterate pamphleteer and revolutionary journalist, proprietor and
editor of L'Ami du Peuple, and idol of the Parisian rabble, who had
bestowed upon him the name borne by his gazette, so that he was known as
The People's Friend.

Such was the foe of the Girondins, and of the pure, altruistic, Utopian
Republicanism for which they stood; and whilst he lived and laboured,
their own endeavours to influence the people were all in vain. From his
vile lodging in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine in Paris he span with
his clever, wicked pen a web that paralysed their high endeavours and
threatened finally to choke them.

He was not alone, of course. He was one of the dread triumvirate in
which Danton and Robespierre were his associates. But to the Girondins
he appeared by far the most formidable and ruthless and implacable of
the three, whilst to Charlotte Corday--the friend and associate now of
the proscribed Girondins who had sought refuge in Caen--he loomed so
vast and terrible as to eclipse his associates entirely. To her young
mind, inflamed with enthusiasm for the religion of Liberty as preached
by the Girondins, Marat was a loathly, dangerous heresiarch, threatening
to corrupt that sublime new faith with false, anarchical doctrine, and
to replace the tyranny that had been overthrown by a tyranny more odious
still.

She witnessed in Caen the failure of the Girondin attempt to raise an
army with which to deliver Paris from the foul clutches of the Jacobins.
An anguished spectator of this failure, she saw in it a sign that
Liberty was being strangled at its birth. On the lips of her friends the
Girondins she caught again the name of Marat, the murderer of Liberty;
and, brooding, she reached a conclusion embodied in a phrase of a letter
which she wrote about that time.

"As long as Marat lives there will never be any safety for the friends
of law and humanity."

From that negative conclusion to its positive, logical equivalent it
was but a step. That step she took.