tion of peasants--a fact
which partly justifies the name that some give her when they call her
"the Jeanne d'Arc of the Revolution."

She did not, however, spend her girlish years amid the fields and woods
tending her sheep, as did the other Jeanne d'Arc; but she was placed
in charge of the sisters in a convent, and from them she received such
education as she had. She was a lonely child, and her thoughts turned
inward, brooding over many things.

After she had left the convent she was sent to live with an aunt. Here
she devoted herself to reading over and over the few books which
the house contained. These consisted largely of the deistic writers,
especially Voltaire, and to some extent they destroyed her convent
faith, though it is not likely that she understood them very fully.

More to her taste was a copy of Plutarch's Lives. These famous stories
fascinated her. They told her of battle and siege, of intrigue and
heroism, and of that romantic love of country which led men to throw
away their lives for the sake of a whole people. Brutus and Regulus were
her heroes. To die for the many seemed to her the most glorious end that
any one could seek. When she thought of it she thrilled with a sort
of ecstasy, and longed with all the passion of her nature that such a
glorious fate might be her own.

Charlotte had nearly come to womanhood at the time when the French
Revolution first broke out. Royalist though she had been in her
sympathies, she felt the justice of the people's cause. She had seen the
suffering of the peasantry, the brutality of the tax-gatherers, and all
the oppression of the old regime. But what she hoped for was a
democracy of order and equality and peace. Could the king reign as a
constitutional monarch rather than as a despot, this was all for which
she cared.

In Normandy, where she lived, were many of those moderate republicans
known as Girondists, who felt as she did and who hoped for the same
peaceful end to the great outbreak. On the other hand, in Paris, the
party of the Mountain, as it was called, ruled with a savage violence
that soon was to culminate in the Reign of Terror. Already the
guillotine ran red with noble blood. Already the king had bowed his head
to the fatal knife. Already the threat had gone forth that a mere breath
of suspicion or a pointed finger might be enough to lead men and women
to a gory death.

In her quiet home near Caen Charlotte Corday heard as from afar the
stor