She had informed her father that she was departing for England. She alighted in Paris.
This falsehood was meant to possess a single virtue: to shield her kin from what she was about to do. Charlotte Corday hoped to slay Marat, to perish instantly, and to leave behind an unknown name. The design was accomplished only in half. Marat died; she survived long enough to be interrogated, tried, painted, and then surrendered to a posterity that would never cease bestowing upon her the names she had wished to carry to the grave.
She came from Caen, where the struggle between Girondins and Montagnards had assumed the flesh and blood of men she encountered daily. Following the proscription of the Girondin deputies in Paris, several had sought refuge in Normandy. A resistance was being organized; there was talk of marching against the masters of the Convention. Corday listened to these speeches with an adherence that went far beyond what was suspected by those to whom she addressed her inquiries.
In her letter to Barbaroux, penned after the murder, she traced her resolution back to the enrollment of the volunteers on July 7, 1793. Why hazard so many lives to reach one man, she reasoned, if a single individual could strike the blow? The calculation lent her purpose the appearance of thrift and devotion. Above all, it presupposed that the civil war possessed a solitary author, that this author could be excised, and that peace would straightway return. In her eyes, Marat concentrated within himself the violence of an entire convulsion.
She departed from Caen on July 9. The journey had nothing of the hushed, solitary march that future canvases might have prepared for her. Fellow travelers conversed; one of them, she recounts, invented for her an identity, a fortune, and then offered her his hand in marriage. She parried his advances with a jest. This contrast was no device of a novelist anxious to let his drama breathe: Corday herself preserved it in the letter wherein she accounted for her journey to kill.
In Paris, a letter of introduction enabled her to wait upon the deputy Duperret. She solicited his assistance regarding a matter concerning Madame de Forbin. The errand possessed a reality of its own, yet it was destined to prove compromising the moment the crime cast a new complexion upon all the traveler's encounters. Duperret had received a young woman bearing a letter; the magistrates would soon inquire what he knew of the knife.
Corday had initially thought to strike down Marat at the Convention. His infirmity kept him confined to his lodgings. It was therefore necessary to seek him out at home. She requested an audience, presented herself, and persisted after an initial refusal. On July 13, she was admitted at last into the presence of the man she claimed to inform on the events in Normandy.
Marat was working in his bath. Disease had halted neither his correspondence nor his political labors; a board served him as a writing-desk. This arrangement, which became the near-universal emblem of his demise, was first and foremost that of a man pursuing his work despite a suffering body. The visitor could speak to him of his adversaries, of the names and movements he wished to know. What he took for intelligence was the chosen pretext to draw near.
Corday stabbed him. Those who hastened into the room seized her; she neither succeeded in vanishing nor attempted to do so under an assumed name. A crowd gathered outside the house. She had expected, she would later say, to be killed on the spot; men shielded her from the fury of the mob and enabled her to be conveyed to prison. She who believed she was to die amid turmoil was to be delivered over to the judicial apparatus she had thought to forestall.
The examinations began. The act was confessed. The preliminary investigation sought to uncover what might lie behind it: accomplices, a mission, encouragements conveyed in veiled words. The acquaintances of Caen and Paris resurfaced one by one. Duperret fell under suspicion; Fauchet likewise. Corday maintained that she had resolved upon the deed alone. In her letters, she grew indignant at the spectacle of men transformed into accomplices merely to satisfy the need to broaden the scope of the crime.
Her composure did not preclude regrets, but they were reserved for others. She feared for her father, pleaded that her kinsmen and friends be defended, and lamented having compromised Duperret through a visit whose purpose he had not known. She who had wished to extinguish a single life was already discovering that the deed ensnared those she had taken pains to keep at a distance.
She continued, nevertheless, to present the murder as the dawn of peace. The letter to Barbaroux is striking because it leaves this conviction untouched amid the grim realities of prison. She speaks therein of her guards, of the impropriety of nocturnal surveillance, of the songs she writes, of those to whom her memory ought to be commended. Then she returns to the delivered France she believes she has brought into being. The cell appears to her a place of waiting after the consummation, whilst without, the assassination stoked a fresh fury.
She also reported that Marat, having jotted down certain names, declared their impending execution. These were the words she attributed to him, not a dialogue whose details could be attested by multiple witnesses. In her narrative, they served an obvious purpose: the threat confirmed, at the final moment, the judgment she had passed before ever leaving Caen.
On July 17, Charlotte Corday appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Chauveau-Lagarde undertook her defense. The proceedings could erase neither the murder nor the premeditation she claimed; the debate turned upon their meaning and the state of mind of the woman who owned them. Where she spoke of public salvation, the prosecution perceived a counter-revolutionary enterprise. The very same words—patriotism and liberty—were invoked on either side, yoked to irreconcilable acts.
The sentence was death. The decree ordered that she be led to the scaffold clad in the red smock of the assassin. The remaining hours belonged also to the portraitist. Hauer, who had sketched her features in the courtroom, captured them before they vanished forever; the face would soon circulate alongside the narratives, sustaining the heroine for some and rendering the assassin all the more unsettling to others. Corday had wished to remain unknown. She emerged from the trial with an image destined to outlive her.
She was executed that same day on the Place de la Révolution. Her fortitude, abundantly recorded, did not prove the soundness of her political calculation; nor did her crime diminish the resolution with which she faced her end. To hold these two truths together is more difficult than to choose between a saint and a monster. Marat became a martyr to his partisans. The promised peace did not arrive with his passing.
In her letter, Corday expressed wonder that the prisoners of the Conciergerie appeared to pity her. The wretched, she observed, grew compassionate. It was perhaps the observation furthest removed from the reasoning that had brought her to Paris: instead of reducing an entire nation to a single enemy, she discovered, in those captive faces, a humanity that did not first inquire to which faction she belonged. She had only a few hours left to behold it.