She may have considered awhile the
proposition thus presented to her, or resolve may have come to her with
realization. She understood that a great sacrifice was necessary; that
who undertook to rid France of that unclean monster must go prepared for
self-immolation. She counted the cost calmly and soberly--for calm and
sober was now her every act.

She made her packages, and set out one morning by the Paris coach from
Caen, leaving a note for her father, in which she had written:

"I am going to England, because I do not believe that it will be
possible for a long time to live happily and tranquilly in France. On
leaving I post this letter to you. When you receive it I shall no longer
be here. Heaven denied us the happiness of living together, as it has
denied us other happinesses. May it show itself more clement to our
country. Good-by, dear Father. Embrace my sister for me, and do not
forget me."

That was all. The fiction that she was going to England was intended to
save him pain. For she had so laid her plans that her identity should
remain undisclosed. She would seek Marat in the very Hall of the
Convention, and publicly slay him in his seat. Thus Paris should behold
Nemesis overtaking the false Republican in the very Assembly which he
corrupted, and anon should adduce a moral from the spectacle of the
monster's death. For herself she counted upon instant destruction at the
hands of the furious spectators. Thus, thinking to die unidentified,
she trusted that her father, hearing, as all France must hear, the great
tidings that Marat was dead, would never connect her with the instrument
of Fate shattered by the fury of the mob.

You realize, then, how great and how terrible was the purpose of
this maid of twenty-five, who so demurely took her seat in the Paris
diligence on that July morning of the Year 2 of the Republic--1793, old
style. She was becomingly dressed in brown cloth, a lace fichu folded
across her well-developed breast, a conical hat above her light brown
hair. She was of a good height and finely proportioned, and her carriage
as full of dignity as of grace. Her skin was of such white loveliness
that a contemporary compares it with the lily. Like Athene, she was
gray-eyed, and, like Athene, noble-featured, the oval of her face
squaring a little at the chin, in which there was a cleft. Calm was her
habit, calm her slow-moving eyes, calm and deliberate her movements, and
calm the mind reflected in al