ich I am now to
give you.

The convent-bred Marie Charlotte Corday d'Armont was the daughter of a
landless squire of Normandy, a member of the chetive noblesse, a man
of gentle birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may have predisposed him
against the law of entail or primogeniture--the prime cause of the
inequality out of which were sprung so many of the evils that afflicted
France. Like many of his order and condition he was among the earliest
converts to Republicanism--the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding
constitutional government of the people by the people, holding
monarchical and aristocratic rule an effete and parasitic anachronism.

From M. de Corday Charlotte absorbed the lofty Republican doctrines to
which anon she was to sacrifice her life; and she rejoiced when the hour
of awakening sounded and the children of France rose up and snapped the
fetters in which they had been trammelled for centuries by an insolent
minority of their fellow-countrymen.

In the early violence of the revolution she thought she saw a transient
phase--horrible, but inevitable in the dread convulsion of that
awakening. Soon this would pass, and the sane, ideal government of
her dreams would follow--must follow, since among the people's elected
representatives was a goodly number of unselfish, single-minded men of
her father's class of life; men of breeding and education, impelled by
a lofty altruistic patriotism; men who gradually came to form a party
presently to be known as the Girondins.

But the formation of one party argues the formation of at least another.
And this other in the National Assembly was that of the Jacobins,
less pure of motive, less restrained in deed, a party in which
stood pre-eminent such ruthless, uncompromising men as Robespierre,
Danton,--and Marat.

Where the Girondins stood for Republicanism, the Jacobins stood for
Anarchy. War was declared between the two. The Girondins arraigned Marat
and Robespierre for complicity in the September massacres, and thereby
precipitated their own fall. The triumphant acquittal of Marat was
the prelude to the ruin of the Girondins, and the proscription of
twenty-nine deputies followed at once as the first step. These fled into
the country, hoping to raise an army that should yet save France, and
several of the fugitives made their way to Caen. Thence by pamphlets and
oratory they laboured to arouse true Republican enthusiasm. They were
gifted, able men, eloquent speake