terrible. Then they brought out false numbers of the People's Friend, often printed with the types and paper of that journal; and it sometimes happened that the readers were deceived by the counterfeit.-which else was written in a stupid and ignoble manner. Marat was repulsively ugly: his stature was not more than four feet, eight inches; the negligence of his dress went even to oddity and slovenliness. Extraordinarily temperate, a handful of rice and some cups of coffee sufficed for his nourishment. Indefatigable in work, he habitually consecrated to it twenty hours a day. He had read prodigiously; especially Montesquieu and J. J. Rousseau, his models of predilection; his memory served him for all the researches of which he had need. He was, beyond contradiction, the most cloquent, the neatest, and the most profound of all the writers of the revolution. He did not content himself with vague predictions, but indicated the precise date on which events would be accomplished. He was not a systematic denouncer, as it has pleased men to say: for those whom he esteemed remained pure even to death. Marat, who ought to be considered the most convinced man of his time, was insupportably proud: bilious, headstrong, and absolute in his will, he could not live except with those who acknowledged his superiority; but he was gentle with his friends and toward the poor. When the partisans of the revolution reproached him with his exaggerations, he replied-You know nothing about it: let me speak; they will only abate too much.' Jealous, but not envious, he never sacrificed a man or a principle to his personal passions. An enemy of quackery and usurped reputations, he never sought for himself either praises or popularity. If he was not very nice with the exploiters of the people, he treated the people itself sometimes as corrardly, ignorant, and frivolous, and sought by every means to rouse it from its torpor. Marat thought that, in every revolution torrents of blood must necessarily flow, whenever at the outset the people did not get rid of irreconcilable tyrants. He did not ambition the ephemeral glory which is sacrificed to by those men who would be at any price the personages of the moment; what he desired was true glory, that which posterity alone can give and confirm. Of a character profoundly religious, he did not fear in following the impulses of his conscience, to make himself accursed: he knew that the day of justice for him would shine neither on his life nor even on a half-century after his death. His poor and wandering life, his disinterested devotion to the sacred cause of Humanity, could only be appreciated by God and by the Future. Marat was at the taking of the Bastille; he and Danton persuaded the expedition to Versailles to bring back the King; he and Loustalot, alone among the journalists, opposed the martial law, under which Bailly and Lafayette afterwards massacred the citizens in the Champ-du-Mars; he obtained the closing of the gaming-houses tolerated by Bailly, and frequented by Mirabeau and others; he, his disciple Fréron, Camille Desmoulins, and Loustalot, were the only journalists uncorrupted by the Court; on the memorable 10th of August he was among the Some of these counterfeit numbers have slipped into almost every set of the People's Friend. For the matter of that, Socrates was ugly also. most active of the leaders of the insurrection; he was the first to demand the abolition of the unjust Constitution of '91; and the September trials were a consequence of his advice, though he took no part in them. The following circular of the insurrectionary committee (appointed on the eve of the 10th of August) to the municipalities throughout France, bears the name of Marat among its signatures. 'The commune of Paris hastens to inform its brothers in all the departments, that a part of the ferocious conspirators detained in the prisons has been put to death by the people: an act of justice which appears to it indispensable, in order to restrain, by terror, the legions of traitors concealed within its walls, at the moment when it is about to march against the enemy. Without doubt, the whole nation, after the long course of treasons which have conducted it to the edge of the abyss, will hasten to adopt this measure so necessary for public safety; and all Frenchmen will cry, as the Parisians,-"We march against the enemy, but we will not leave behind us these brigands to cut the throats of our children and our wives." Marat was the fifth elected of the representatives of Paris to the Convention: Robespierre being the first, Danton the second, and Manuel and Camille Desmoulins the third and fourth. But his candidature was most violently opposed by both royalists and girondists, who were prodigal of abuse against him. Jacobins however declared 'that he must be in the Convention, as the leaven in The For good or ill however, the responsibility of this Justice of the People rests not only upon Marat. He advised the excention of proved traitors in case of need. The natural impulse of the People recognized that advice as sound. Then (not till then) Danton and the insurrectionary committee interfered that the executions might proceed with order and fairness, seeking to moderate what they could not prevent: it was a terrible necessity. Acknow ledged so by men of all parties except the royalists themselves. Strict Roland,' as Carlyle calls him, the virtuous minister of the interior, did nothing to prevent it; wrote to the Assembly twenty-four hours after the executions commenced, of the Justice of the People,' of which he was only disposed to blame the continuance. Pétion (the mayor of Paris) issued the following-Citizens, you who to a just vengeance know how to join the love of order'-etc. The Assembly took no steps to prevent the four days continuance of the tria's. And Brissot, amiable Girondist, only expressed his regret that one of his personal encmics had been acquitted. The accounts of outrages, obscenities, etc., are 'inventions of the enemy. Even the story of the blood offered to the daughter of M. Sombreuil is shown to be false. If in the first outbreak some prisoners were indiscriminately massacred, so also were others saved en masse. Two hundred and fifty Swiss were set at liberty because they were considered tools rather than traitors. At the Abbaye Prison, on which the first wave of the popular fury broke, one hundred and forty persons were killed (of these sixty after trial); and eighty were acquitted. At La Force there were three hundred and seventyfive prisoners. In the night of the 2nd of September Danton and the Committee set at liberty all the women, twenty-four in number, among them some of the queen's ladies. Of the remaining prisoners one hundred and sixty four were condemned and slain, one hundred and eighty-seven were acquitted.- We give these figures, proof of which still exists in the prison-registers, simply to destroy the calumny of an indiscriminate massacre. In general those who were slain were men sufficiently condemned by the notoriety of their crimes and by their own confessions. Excepting the nonjuring priests, who fell in the first impulse of passion, there was but one whose innocence could be established. He was a soldier, who either had thought to escape by telling a lie to his judges, or who perished from a mistake as to his name. The exact number of those who fell was nine hundred and ninety-sixnot one thousand and eighty-nine, as Mr. Carlyle asserts on the authority of a royalist declaimer who mentions among the victims men alive long after. the dough, to make good bread of it'; that he only was able to hinder the representatives of the people from prevaricating; that he had forescen all and had the courage not to conceal it. In the Convention he shared with Danton and Robespierre the leadership of the Mountain. Here his eloquence and impertur pable self-posession overcame even the malignity of the Girondists, who in the first instance endeavoured, by exciting clamour by the most odious calumnies, to exclude him from the tribune. At the very opening of the session they sought to manage a decree of accusation against him, by means of a manœuvre. Boileau read the following passage from one of the numbers of the People's Friend, pretending that it was the number which had that day appeared :-'One sole reflection weighs upon me,-it is that all my efforts to save the people will end in nothing without a new insurrection.' The Convention was furious; cries of To the Guillotine arose around Marat. 'I demand,' continued Boileau, that this monster be decreed under accusation.' It was with difficulty that Marat obtained a hearing for the explanation that the passage attacked was from an old number of the journal. So the Girondins commenced the fatal struggle of parties. On the appointment of the commission to prepare the accusation against the king, it was Marat who demanded that there should be no question of any of the acts of Louis previous to his acceptance of the constitution, because those acts had been covered by the amnesty of September, 1791. Some pretended delegates of the Paris sections and the departments appearing at the bar of the Convention, with a demand for violent measures, Marat repelled them, by cross-questioning them and so proving that they were not delegated by the people. Another set of petitioners demanded the heads of Vergniaud and others of the Girondists. Marat was foremost to defend those assailed. After a while Marat was at the tribune ten times a day; almost all the principal measures were carried by his advice. He treated his colleagues cavalierly; sometimes calling them escaped lunatics, employing irony, the closest reasoning, or violent apostrophes, as occasion seemed to require. The president censured him, his own party sometimes disavowed him, the moderates never stayed their insults and denunciations; the majority, in spite of itself, was swayed by him. At length his enemies carried an act of accusation against him: for having provoked,-1, pillage and murder, 2, an attempt against the sovereignty of the people, 3, the bringing into contempt and dissolution of the Convention. On his trial, Marat replied with confidence to all the questions; the witnesses completely justified him. It was proved that Brissot, Condorcet, and others of that faction, had calumniated him in their pages, and invented falschoods since his accusation, in order to prejudice the jury. He defended himself both on the ground of his right to the free expression of opinion, and also showing his innocence of the matters charged against him. He was unanimously acquitted, and carried by the people to the Convention, triumphantly crowned with oak and laurel. Marat laid aside the crowns, and bade his fellow citizens to wait till the end of his career before they judged him. The Gironde continuing to play into the hands of the Royalists, the People again put forth its strength to purge the Convention of Traitors; and the most notorious of the Girondists were placed under accusation. The purified Conven tion now drew up and adopted the famous Constitution of 1793, of which Marat was the zealous advocate. The Girondists took to flight, and sought to save themselves by exciting the provinces to civil war. Some of them found a refuge at Caen, where they made the acquaintance of Charlotte Corday d' Armans, a young girl of excessive vanity, of resolute character, and a royalist. These deputies persuaded her that she could immortalize herself by delivering France from the Mountain. For this purpose it was necessary, they said, to cut the Mountain in two, that is to say, to kill Danton, who mainly held the party together. Five deputies gave Charlotte Corday instructions, and letters to those of their side still remaining in the Convention. Charlotte, arriving in Paris, opened her letters, where she saw that her friends accused Danton of wishing to place the dauphin upon the throne. Averse then to destroy a man who might serve her own cause, she resolved to kill Marat. Accordingly on the 12th of July, she wrote to him under a false name, to announce to him that she would put him in the way of rendering a great service to France. Next morning she presented herself at his residence in the street L'Ecole de Médecine; but was not received: Marat, for some time laid up with an inflammatory complaint, brought on by his excessive labours, having scarcely time to write his journal. Charlotte Corday therefore returned to her hotel, and wrote as follows. 'I wrote to you this morning, Marat: have you received my letter? I cannot think it, since I have been turned away from your door. I hope that at least you will grant me an interview. I repeat to you, I am just arrived from Caen, I have to reveal to you secrets most important to the safety of the republic. Besides this, I am persecuted for the cause of Liberty; I am unfortunate: it is enough to be so to have a right to your protection.' At half past seven in the evening she returned to the house. She was still refused admittance, because Marat was in his bath and busy writing. But he, overhearing her expostulations, ordered her to be let in. He questioned her as to the names of the deputies at Caen, and on other matters relative to the town. Whilst he was taking notes of her replies, she drew a knife from under her robe, and plunged it into his heart. He uttered only one cry-To me dear friend!— (A moi, ma chère amie!) and expired immediately, His wife and a newspaperfolder ran in, but only in time to seize the murderer. § The whole Convention attended his funeral. The People followed, every section f Not by his vices, as Carlyle disgustingly insinuates. He Charlotte Corday died like a heroine; but in those days of exaltation, mere faint heartedness was unknown. She died with a falsehood on her lips, comparing herself to Brutus, though her object (so far as she had one beyond the gratification of her self-love) was the reestablishment of the monarchy. It is the fashion to absolve her, on the ground that her one murder saved many-the fashion of those who attack Marat. For we will not leave unanswered the accusation against Marat: the only one that can remain. demanded the death of some five or six hundred convicted traitors (never two hundred and sixty thousand, as careful Mr. Carlyle asserts) because he foresaw that to spare them was TO MURDER THE PEOPLE. Was he not right in his prevision ? And what say the admirers of the royalist murderess? For ourselves, we dare say this: when the battle is raging around us, we would not leave the proved traitors within our walls, to stab us in the back. under its banner, in respectful silence. Tears were in all eyes; every one felt the wound that had been inflicted on the republic. The body of Marat was buried in the garden of the Cordeliers; but his memory lay in the people's heart. Almost divine honours were paid to him: the Cordeliers 1 erected an altar to his praise, and in the schools the teachers and their pupils made the sign of the Cross at the mention of his name. His death struck the Republic to the heart. For he loved Justice, and the People; and if his words were sometimes wild, his very hate was but the madness of his love. RHYMES AND REASONS AGAINST LANDLORDISM TRY AGAIN. The coldest hours are close upon the morn; Night ever neareth day: Up, man! and wrestle yet again with scorn; Try again! Is baffled beaten? Will the hero fail Another ladder! Let our comrades scale O Hope forlornest, masked like Despair! Truth must some day succeed. Thy failure proves-What ?-thy once failing there. Try again! NEARING IT. Every minute in the night, Be it dark and dread, Is a step toward the light On the mountain head: Till our eyelids reach the dawn, And the fearful night is gone, Danton's Club: of which, as well as of the Jacobins, Marat was a member. |