Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/233

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CHAPTER XVIII.

IN OUTLAWRY.

On the eve of the 14th of July, the fourth anniversary of the storming of the Bastile, from which the year of Liberty dated, a tall, beautiful girl, in Normandy cap and simple white dress, stopped at a sombre-looking house in the Rue des Cordeliers, and asked for Marat. She had come from Caen, where she had seen the proscribed Girondins, but without coming into personal relations with them, though she had spoken to Barbaroux, without revealing her purpose.

Marat—who knows not the tragic tale?—received Charlotte Corday sitting in a medicated bath, covered by a board for writing, when she, pretending to bring him news of the traitors at Caen, plunged her knife into his heart.

On the day of Marat's funeral, at which the whole Convention assisted, Champagneux was on his way to Madame Roland in her prison. The honours paid to Marat filled her with violent indignation, succeeded by hopeless gloom. "I shall never leave this place," said she, "but for the scaffold. However, I suffer less concerning my own fate than for the calamities which will overwhelm my country; it is ruined!"