More and more furious swept the torrent, gathering to itself all that was vile and outcast.  Where were the pale-faced, determined patriots who sat in the National Assembly?  Some of them riding with dukes and marquises to the guillotine.  Was this the equality they expected when they cried, “Down with the Aristocrats”?

Did they think they could guide the whirlwind after raising it?  As well whisper to the cyclone to level only the tall trees, or to the conflagration to burn only the temples and palaces.

With restraining agencies removed, religion, government, king, all swept away, that hideous brood born of vice, poverty, hatred, and despair came out from dark hiding-places; and what had commenced as a patriotic revolt had become a wild orgy of bloodthirsty demons, led by three master-demons, Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, vying with each other in ferocity.

Then we see that simple girl thinking by one supreme act of heroism and sacrifice, like Joan of Arc, to save her country.  Foolish child!  Did she think to slay the monster devouring Paris by cutting off one of his heads?  The death of Marat only added to the fury of the tempest, and the falling of Charlotte Corday’s head was not more noticed than the falling of a leaf in the forest.

The slaughter of the people had been reduced to an admirable system.  The public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, went every day to the “Committee of Public Safety” to procure the list of the proscribed, who were immediately placed in the Conciergerie to await trial.  This list was then submitted to Robespierre, who with his pencil marked the names of those who would be executed on the morrow.

The mockery of the trial of Charlotte Corday was not delayed.  This girl belonged to a family of the smaller nobility.  In her secluded life in the country, a mind of superior quality had fed upon the new philosophy of the period.  An enthusiasm for liberty, and a horror of tyranny, had taken possession of her.  In passionate sympathy with the early purposes of the Revolution, Marat seemed to her a monster, the incarnation of the spirit which would defeat the cause of Liberty.  It was believed that his list of the proscribed was not confined to Paris, but that the names of thousands of victims all over France were already designated.  In that extraordinary scene at her trial, when questioned, she impatiently said, “Yes, yes, I killed him.  I killed one man to save a hundred thousand!”

Nothing was lacking to make this, with one exception, the most dramatic incident of the Revolution.  Her eloquent address, to the French people, found pinned to the waist of her dress after her execution, and her splendid courage to the end, rounds out the picturesque story of her useless martyrdom.  A Girondist waiting in the Conciergerie, when he heard of her crime and end, exclaimed:  “It will kill us!  But she has taught us how to die!”