ctim, but she did not strike again;
casting it down at his feet, she left the closet, and sat down in the
neighboring room, thoughtfully passing her hand across her brow: her
task was done.

The wife of Marat had rushed to his aid on hearing his cry for help.
Laurent Basse, seeing that all was over, turned round toward Charlotte,
and, with a blow of a chair, felled her to the floor; while the
infuriated Albertine trampled her under her feet. The tumult aroused the
other tenants of the house; the alarm spread, and a crowd gathered in
the apartment, who learned with stupor that Marat, the Friend of the
People, had been murdered. Deeper still was their wonder when they gazed
on the murderess. She stood there before them with still disordered
garments, and her disheveled hair, loosely bound by a broad green ribbon
falling around her; but so calm, so serenely lovely, that those who most
abhorred her crime gazed on her with involuntary admiration. "Was she
then so beautiful?" was the question addressed, many years afterward, to
an old man, one of the few remaining witnesses of this scene.
"Beautiful!" he echoed, enthusiastically; adding, with the eternal
regrets of old age: "Ay, there are none such now!"

On the morning of the 17th, she was led before her judges. She was
dressed with care, and had never looked more lovely. Her bearing was so
imposing and dignified, that the spectators and the judges seemed to
stand arraigned before her. She interrupted the first witness, by
declaring that it was she who had killed Marat. "Who inspired you with
so much hatred against him?" asked the President.

"I needed not the hatred of others, I had enough of my own," she
energetically replied; "besides, we do not execute well that which we
have not ourselves conceived."

"What, then, did you hate in Marat?"

"His crimes."

"Do you think that you have assassinated all the Marats?"

"No; but now that he is dead, the rest may fear."

She answered other questions with equal firmness and laconism. Her
project, she declared, had been formed since the 31st of May. "She had
killed one man to save a hundred thousand She was a republican long
before the Revolution, and had never failed in energy."

"What do you understand by energy?" asked the President.

"That feeling," she replied, "which induces us to east aside selfish
considerations, and sacrifice ourselves for our country."

Fouquier Tinville here observed, alluding to the sure bl