if not rejoiced, indifferent—­and many of those who impute to him the honour of martyrdom, or assist at his apotheosis, are much better satisfied both with his christian and heathen glories, than they were while he was living to propagate anarchy and pillage.  The reverence of the Convention itself is a mere political pantomime.  Within the last twelve months nearly all the individuals who compose it have treated Marat with contempt; and I perfectly remember even Danton, one of the members of the Committee of Salut Publique, accusing him of being a contre revolutionnaire.

But the people, to use a popular expression here, require to be electrified.—­St. Fargeau is almost forgotten, and Marat is to serve the same purposes when dead, to which he contributed while living.—­An extreme grossness and want of feeling form the characteristic feature of the Parisians; they are ignorant, credulous, and material, and the Convention do not fail on all occasions to avail themselves of these qualities.  The corpse of Marat decently enclosed in a coffin would have made little impression, and it was not pity, but revenge, which was to be excited.  The disgusting object of a dead leper was therefore exposed to the eyes of a metropolis calling itself the most refined and enlightened of all Europe—­

              “And what t’oblivion better were consign’d,
               Is hung on high to poison half mankind.”

I know not whether these lines are most applicable to the display of Marat’s body, or the consecration of his fame, but both will be a lasting stigma on the manners and morals of Paris.

If the departments, however, take no interest in the loss of Marat, the young woman who assassinated him has created a very lively one.  The slightest anecdotes concerning her are collected with avidity, and repeated with admiration; and this is a still farther proof of what you have heard me advance, that neither patriotism nor humanity has an abundant growth in this country.  The French applaud an act in itself horrid and unjustifiable, while they have scarcely any conception of the motive, and such a sacrifice seems to them something supernatural.—­The Jacobins assert, that Charlotte Corday was an emissary of the allied powers, or, rather, of Mr. Pitt; and the Parisians have the complaisance to believe, that a young woman could devote herself to certain destruction at the instigation of another, as though the same principles which would lead a person to undertake a diplomatic commission, would induce her to meet death.

I wrote some days ago to a lady of my acquaintance at Caen, to beg she would procure me some information relative to this extraordinary female, and I subjoin an extract of her answer, which I have just received: