344 CORDAY CORDILLERA their father in a convent at Caen. Among the visitors was M. de Belzunce, a young cavalry officer, between whom and Charlotte a tender feeling sprung up. She was intellectual, vehe- ment, and enthusiastic ; she was a republican in feeling, and entertained the most exalted ideas of the duties of patriotism. Her lover having been assassinated by the mob of Caen, she vowed revenge against those whom she -conceived to have instigated the murder. After the revolution had closed the doors of the oonvent, she removed to the house of her aunt, an old royalist lady. Many Girondists had iled to Caen ; among them was Barbaroux, and Charlotte found a pretext for calling upon him. The conversation chiefly turned upon the tragic fate of the Girondists, upon Mme. Roland, and upon Marat, for whom she had long felt a horror. On the morning of July 9, 1793, she suddenly left the house of her aunt, on pretext of a journey to England. On the llth she was in Paris, where she took a room not far from Marat's dwelling. For a time her mind was undecided as to whether Marat or Robespierre should fall, when Marat's journal, ISAmi du Peuple, in which he said that 200,000 more heads must be lopped off in order to secure the success of the revolution, fixed her deter- mination. She addressed a letter to Marat soliciting an audience, in order to acquaint him with the plots of the Girondists at Caen. No answer came, and on the morning of July 13, After having purchased a knife in the Palais Royal, she called upon Marat, who then resided in a gloomy house in the rue des Cordeli&res. She was refused admittance. She wrote a second note and called again at half-past 7 the same evening, when with some difficulty she gained admittance to Marat, who was just taking a bath. He listened to her report of the proceedings of the Girondists, and taking down their names, remarked with a smile, " Within a week they will all go to the guil- lotine." Drawing the knife which she had concealed in her bosom, she plunged it to the hilt in Marat's heart. He gave a loud cry and sank back dead. She was immediately arrest- ed and transferred to the nearest prison, the Abbaye. Her trial took place on the morning of July IV ; she was sentenced to death, and guillotined the evening of the same day. Her courage did not forsake her for a moment. She declared that her project had been formed since May 31, when the Robespierre party had pronounced the doom of the Girondists, and that she had killed one man in order to save a hundred thousand. Her remarkable beauty and her lofty bearing on her way to the guillo- tine sent a thrill even through the hearts of her executioners. A young German enthu- siast, Adam Lux, a deputy from the city of Mentz, at the execution cried out, u She is greater than Brutus." He wrote a pamphlet suggesting that a statue with such an inscrip- tion should be erected to her memory, for which he was arrested and guillotined. Andre Chenier, who paid a glowing poetical homage to her heroism, shared the same fate a year later. CORDELIERS. I. A name given in France to the friars of the Franciscan order, in allusion to the cord tied with three knots which they wear as a girdle. The title is said to have originated in the time of the crusades, when St. Louis, struck by their prowess in bat- tle with the infidels, asked their name, and was told that they were cordeliez, or " tied with cords." At one time there were in France 224 male and 123 female convents of this order. (See FKANOISOANS.) II* A political club during the first French revolu- tion, which received the name from its mem- bers meeting in the chapel of the old convent of the Franciscan friars situated near the rue de 1'Scole de Medecine and the rue de 1'Obser- vance, in the centre of the quarter of Paris known as the Cordeliers' district. It became the focus of the wildest agitators, and was constantly quarrelling with the Jacobin club. Marat and Danton were its ruling spirits. At the time the club was in its zenith, Camille Desmoulins edited a popular journal in connec- tion with it under the name of Le vieux Cor- delier. The club was closed by the law of 6th Fructidor, or Aug. 23, 1795, which dissolved all the political clubs of France. CORDILLERA, a Spanish word meaning a mountain chain or ridge. It is commonly ap- plied to the whole or a portion of the chain of the Andes, as la Cordillera de los Andes ; la Cordillera de la Costa, the chain which runs near the Pacific coast ; and la Cordillera Real, the northern prolongation in Venezuela and Colombia of the main interior chain. Some authorities consider the Cordilleras of Central America and those extending northward near the Pacific to the frigid zone as the continua- tion of the Andes, forming with them one range from the Antarctic to the Arctic ocean, and that hence they should be described under one common name. But the break at the isthmus of Panama, the only one in the chain between this point and the straits of Magellan, the diverging course of the ranges of the Andes as they approach the northern limits of South America, and the fact that the comparatively low elevation of the isthmus can at the most be called the continuation of the inferior Cor- dillera of the coast, taking on the other side of the break an entirely new course, as it sweeps round to N. W. these lead others to the con- clusion that the mountain ranges of North and South America are too distinct from each other to be classed as one range, notwithstanding they are connected by the continuation throughout their extent of the same great geological forma- tions. The South American Cordilleras have been treated under the title ANDES ; the ran- ges through Central America and Mexico may be described under the present head ; while to their extension further north the name ROCKY MOUNTAINS is given. Upon the isthmus the Cordilleras present the lowest and narrowest
