morning of the 13th. of July, having first purchased a knife in the Palace Royal, and written him a note, in which she requested an interview. She was refused admittance. She then wrote him a second note, more pressing than the first, and in which she represented herself as persecuted for the cause of freedom. Without waiting to see what effect this note might produce, she called again at half-past seven the same evening.
Marat then resided in the Rue des Cordeliers, in a gloomy-looking house, which has since been demolished. His constant fears of assassination was shared by those around him; the porter, seeing a strange woman pass by his lodge without pausing to make any inquiry, ran out and called her back. She did not heed his remonstrance, but swiftly ascended the old stone staircase, until she had reached the door of Marat's apartment. It was cautiously opened by Albertine, a woman with whom Marat cohabited, and who passed for his wife. Recognising the same young and handsome girl who had already called on her husband, and animated, perhaps, by a feeling of jealous mistrust, Albertine refused to admit her; Charlotte insisted with great earnestness. The sound of their altercation reached Marat; he immediately ordered his wife to admit the stranger, whom he recognised as the author of the two letters he had received in the course of the day. Albertine obeyed reluctantly; she allowed Charlotte to enter; and, after crossing with her an antechamber, where she had been occupied with a man named Laurent Basse in folding some numbers of the "Ami du People," she ushered her through two other rooms, until they came to a narrow closet, where Marat was then in a bath. He gave a look at Charlotte, and ordered his wife to leave them alone: she complied, but allowed the door of the closet to remain half open, and kept within call.
According to his usual custom, Marat wore a soiled handkerchief bound round his head, increasing his natural hideousness. A coarse covering was thrown across the bath; a board, likewise placed transversely, supported his papers. Laying down his pen, he asked Charlotte the purport of her visit. The closet was so narrow that she touched the bath near which she stood. She gazed on him with ill-disguised horror and disgust, but answered, as composedly as she could, that she had come from Caën, in order to give him correct intelligence concerning the proceedings of the Girondists there. He listened, questioned her eagerly, wrote down the names of the Girondists, then added, with a smile of triumph:—"Before a week they shall have perished on the guillotine." "These words," afterwards said Charlotte, "sealed his fate." Drawing from beneath the handkerchief which covered her bosom the knife she had kept there all along, she plunged it to the hilt in Marat's heart. He gave one loud expiring cry for help, and sank back dead, in the bath. By an instinctive impulse, Charlotte had instinctively drawn out the knife from the breast of her victim, but she did not strike again; casting it down at his feet, she left the closet, and sat down in the neighbouring room, thoughtfully passing her hand across her brow: her work was done.
The wife of Marat rushed to his aid on hearing his cry for help. Laurent Basse, seeing that all was over, turned round towards Charlotte, and, with a blow of a chair, felled her to the floor; whilst the infuriated Albertine trampled her under her feet The
