Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/230

 tumult aroused the other tenants of the house; the alarm spread, and a crowd gathered in the apartment, who learned with stupor that Marat, the Friend of the People, had been murdered. Deeper still was their wonder when they gazed on the murderess. She stood there before them with still disordered garments, and her dishevelled hair, loosely bound by a broad green riband, falling around her; but so calm, so serenely lovely, that those who most abhorred her crime gazed on her with involuntary admiration. "Was she then so beautiful?" was the question addressed, many years afterwards, to an old man, one of the few remaining witnesses of this scene. "Beautiful!" he echoed, enthusiastically; adding, with the wonted regrets of old age—"Aye, there are none such now!"

The commissary of police began his interrogatory in the saloon of Marat's apartment. She told him her name, how long she had been in Paris, confessed her crime, and recognised the knife with which it had been perpetrated. The sheath was found in her pocket, with a thimble, some thread, money, and her watch.

"What was your motive in assassinating Marat?" asked the commissary

"To prevent a civil war," she answered.

"Who are your accomplices?"

"I have none."

She was ordered to be transferred to the Abbaye, the nearest prison. An immense and infuriated crowd had gathered around the door of Marat's house; one of the witnesses perceived that she would have liked to be delivered to this maddened multitude, and thus perish at once. She was not saved from their hands without difficulty; her courage failed her at the sight of the peril she ran, and she fainted away on being conveyed to the fiacre. On reaching the Abbaye, she was questioned until midnight by Chabot and Drouet, two Jacobin members of the Convention. She answered their interrogatories with singular firmness; observing, in conclusion:—"I have done my task, let others do theirs." Chabot threatened her with the scaffold; she answered him with a smile of disdain. Her behaviour until the 17th., the day of her trial, was marked by the same firmness. She wrote to Barbaroux a charming letter, full of graceful wit and heroic feeling. Her playfulness never degenerated into levity: like that of the illustrious Thomas More, it was the serenity of a mind whom death had no power to daunt.

On the morning of the 17th., she was led before her judges. She was dressed with care, and had never looked more lovely. Her bearing was so imposing and dignified, that the spectators and judges seemed to stand arraigned before her. She interrupted the first witness, by declaring that it was she who had killed Marat. "Who inspired you with such hatred against him?" asked the President.

"I needed not the hatred of others, I had enough of my own," she energetically replied; "besides, we do not execute well that which we have not ourselves conceived."

She answered other questions with equal firmness and laconism. Her project, she declared, had been formed since the 31st. of May. "She had killed one man to save a hundred thousand. She was a republican long before the Revolution, and had never failed in energy."