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death of Charlotte, exclaimed, "She destroys us, but she teaches us how to die."

The purest virtue is deceived in her aim when she borrows the hand and weapons of crime. The blood of Marat intoxicated the people. The Mountain, Robespierre, Danton, happy at being freed from a rival whose influence with the multitude they feared, cast his corpse to them, in order that they might erect it into an idol. The convention ordained the worship of Marat as a diversion to anarchy, and permitted a god to be made of him whom it had blushed to own as a colleague. The night after his death the people hung garlands at his door, and the convention inaugurated his bust in their hall. The sections appeared at the convention, to demand that he should be buried in the Panthéon. Others asked that his body should be embalmed, and carried through the departments to the very limits of the world. Some proposed that an empty tomb should be erected to him beneath every tree of liberty. Robespierre alone strove to moderate this idolatry of the Jacobins. "Doubtless," said he, "the honours of the poniard are reserved for me; priority has been established by chance, and my fall is near at hand."

The convention decreed that it would be present en masse at the funeral. The painter David arranged the obsequies, and strove to imitate those of Cæsar. He placed the body of Marat in the church of the Cordeliers, on a catafalque. The poniard, the bath, the block of wood, the inkstand, pens, and papers were displayed by his side, as the arms of the philosopher and the proofs of his stoical indigence. Deputations of the sections succeeded each other with harangues, incense, and flowers, and pronounced terrible vows over the corpse.

In the evening the funeral cortège went forth, lighted by the flambeau of the church, and did not reach the place of sepulture until midnight. The place selected for the reception of Marat's remains was the very one where he had so often harangued and agitated the people, the court of the club of Cordeliers, as we inter a warrior on his field of battle. The body was lowered into the grave under the shade of those trees whose leaves, illuminated by thousands of lamps, shed over his tomb the soft and serene light of ancient elysium. The people, under the banners of the sections, the departments, the electors, the commune, the Cordeliers, the Jacobins, and the convention, assisted at this ceremony. Derisive apotheosis! The president of the assembly, Thuriot, addressed the last national adieu to his shade. He announced that the convention would place the statue of Marat by the side of that of Brutus. The club of the Cordeliers claimed his heart. Enclosed in an urn, it was suspended from the roof of the hall of assembly. The society voted him also an altar. "Precious relics of a god!" exclaimed an orator at the foot of this altar, "shall we be perjured in presence of thy manes? Thou demandest vengeance of us, and thy assassins yet breathe!"

Pilgrimages of the people congregated every Sunday at the tomb of Marat, and mingled the heart of this apostle of murder in the same adoration as that of the Christ of peace. The theatres were decorated with his image. Places and streets changed their names for his. The mayor of Nîmes caused himself to be designated the Marat of the south; the mayor of Strasburg, the Marat of the Rhine. The conventionnel Carrier called his troops the army of Marat. The widow or mistress of "l'ami du peuple" demanded vengeance from the convention for her husband, and a tomb for herself. Young girls, dressed in white, and holding crowns of cypress and oak in

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their hands, sang around the funeral car hymns to Marat. All the burden of these chants was sanguinary. The poniard of Charlotte Corday, in lieu of stanching blood, appeared to have opened the veins of France.d

ESTIMATES OF MARAT

Perhaps even for Marat a word of common justice should be spoken. The deeds he accomplished and the worse deeds he inspired are horrible enough without soiling reproach with slander. It is common to paint him as a monster of hideous filth and degradation, and his life in cellars and sewers when a price was on his head had indeed given him a skin-disease which the science of that day could not prevent from serious aggravation; but to-day's science would call it a harmless eruption, easily cured. It is common to speak of him with contempt as a veterinary surgeon - Carlyle e calls him a "horseleech" - which is not true and would prove nothing if it were.

Marat's early life gave no prophecy of his end. He was born in 1743, in Switzerland, son of a successful physician, who sent him to travel and then to study medicine for two years at Bordeaux. He practised in Paris, later in Holland, and eventually in a fashionable district of London. A philosophical Essay on Man, published there in 1773, showed a remarkable command of the history of philosophy. This and other works brought him honorary membership in various learned societies. In 1775 Edinburgh University gave him as an honour the degree of M.D.

He was of such repute that the count of Artois, afterwards King Charles X of France, made him brevet physician to his guards, and he became a very successful physician to the aristocracy of France. Meanwhile he was gaining repute as a scientist, optics and electricity being his special fields. When the Académie des Sciences rejected him as a dissentient from Newton, whose Optics he translated into French, Goethe was indignant at the despotism. Marat was large enough for Voltaire to attack and for Franklin to befriend. His Plan de Législation Criminelle in 1780 was notably humane.

The rise of revolution found this distinguished man ripe for action. He began to publish his paper, L'Ami du Peuple. He seems to have felt an absolutely sincere abhorrence for all forms of autocracy. The woes of the common people had set his heart not aglow, but aflame. One who has read of the torments endured by the poorer classes of the old régime has surely seen that it gave some temptation to fanaticism and that a heart inclined to be revengeful would have impulse enough towards ferocity. Marat always attacked the one in power- municipal council, king, or Gironde. It was the municipal council under Bailly that sought to repress him. He fled to London in January, 1790, and again in December, 1791, returning to live a subterranean life. The manner in which he evaded whole corps of detectives and yet kept publishing his journal, has something of magic in it.

His very invisibleness gave him an uncanny hold on the popular mind, but when it was safe to appear in public he could face the whole convention coolly and answer denunciation with proud confession and counter-denunciation. He was most radical in his measures and believed in turning on the royalists the punishment they would speedily enough wreak on the republicans if they could return. He is accordingly blameworthy in part for the September massacres, though he previously strove to secure a tribunal to try the royalist prisoners legally.

Later Marat saw that the Gironde was interested in federalising France. He thought that this was to sacrifice Paris to the jealousy of other cities, to

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rob the cause of centralisation, and to present dissension to the armies outside. His old associates, Robespierre and Danton, turned against him, and Marat, as we have seen, faced a tumult of abuse such as has rarely been endured. Instead of denying many of the charges, he turned them into boasts.

After this, the convention had declared the French Republic one and indivisible. "And this," says Bougeart, an earnest, perhaps too earnest, defender of Marat, "is how this clashing of shields by the Girondins ended. The assembly understood that unity had saved France, that in unity alone lay her salvation, and by its voting showed faith in it. To whom did the country owe this declaration? To Marat alone."

Of his character, his contemporary, Fabre d'Églantine,9 wrote: "But in this Marat, gentle-hearted, if we judge him by the spirit he showed, we have seen a strong-headed man, of invincible courage, of unshaken firmness. I have never seen him, even in the most violent storms, without rare presence of mind. In his designs, in their execution, in his opinions, in his patriotic hatred, nothing could make him deviate or bend. It was not obstinacy, for he knew how to recognise reason and how to praise it in another when it exceeded his own. And all this with so simple a manner that the yielding itself was a testimony to his superiority. In danger, in the most personal and spiteful attacks, in most violent persecution, his courage and intrepidity were worthy of admiration. No reverses depressed him, no consideration dominated him. A special proof is given of this in the manner with which he bore at the convention the terrible and combined attacks of all the aristocracy of France in the person of his enemies then present; in the striking victory he carried off alone; in the terror he inspired in their souls as he stood there with disdain on his lips and a pistol in his hand.

"He had more than mere good-heartedness. One of the bases of his character was that great modesty that engenders and nourishes in an honest man simplicity, love of truth, and good and noble sentiments. Nothing annoyed him more than impudence. The sight of effrontery united to dissimulation sometimes made him writhe with wrath, sometimes lent his attitude and discourse a strong dignity, a proud gravity under which his small stature disappeared. I would bid you be modest,' was his favourite phrase, and although he often had occasion to use it, yet he said it with such sincerity that it was strongly felt and never seemed hypocritical in his mouth."

A latter-day Englishman, H. Morse Stephens, has also found it possible to say: "Whatever his political ideas, two things shine clearly out of the mass of prejudice which has shrouded the name of Marat-that he was a man of great attainments, and acknowledged position, who sacrificed fortune, health, life itself, to his convictions, and that he was no bête féroce, no factious demagogue, but a man, and a humane man too, who could not keep his head cool in stirring times, who was rendered suspicious by constant persecution, and who has been regarded as a personification of murder, because he published every thought in his mind, while others only vented their anger and displayed their suspicions in spoken words."

It must finally be remembered that if Marat was an advocate of ferocity he was also its victim; if the enemies he roused were sincere, they attempted the same weapons as he, and succeeded with a knife. It is almost impossible to abhor Charlotte Corday. She always looks out through the bars in such beauty, that her deed takes on a sanctity. But the mere fact that Marat was unpleasant to the eyes should not blind us to the fact that his deeds were no less honestly misguided than hers, and hers no less ruthlessly cruel than

[1793 A.D.] his. They were both victims of an overwhelming social upheaval, and both used ugly weapons earnestly, as did almost everyone about them— royalist, constitutionist, Vendean, communard, foreigner, native citizen, or peasant. Marat is a tragic figure in history and worthy of abundant abhorrence, if ever man were; but he should not be distinguished in infamy beyond his desert.a

CONSTITUTION OF THE YEAR III

The discussion of the new constitution promised a return to a system of law and order. The general insurrection of the provinces tempered the zeal, if it did not excite the fears of the leaders in the capital. As the provinces succumbed, however, feelings of irritation and vengeance appeared; the revolutionary monster felt the return of its access of fury, that had for a moment been allayed. The new constitution, one as democratic as could well be formed, was to be proclaimed and inaugurated on the 10th of August, 1793. The departments, which in two months had almost all given in their submission to the convention, were requested to send commissaries to Paris in token of reconciliation. They came; and on the 10th of August Paris enjoyed the spectacle of a third federation, celebrating the birth of the third constitution that had been framed in the short space of four years. The ceremony was arranged by the painter David.b

David was inspired by Robespierre. Nature, reason, creed, country — were the only divinities who presided at this regeneration of the social world. The people were there the only majesty. Symbols and allegories were the sole objects of adoration. Soul was wanting there because God was absent. Robespierre dared not yet unveil his image. The place of union and the point of departure of the cortège, as in all the fêtes of the Revolution, was the site of the Bastille, marked as the first step of the republic. Upon the ground of the Bastille a fountain, called the fountain of Regeneration, washed away the traces of former servitude. A colossal statue of Nature, whose breasts poured forth water, presided over this fountain. The cup circulated from hand to hand amongst all the assistants. The cortège defiled, to the sound of cannon, upon the boulevards.

Each society raised its flag, each section its symbol. The members of the convention advanced last, each one holding in the hand a bouquet of flowers, fruit, and fresh ears of corn. The tables on which the Rights of Man were written, and the ark in which the constitution was enclosed, were carried as holy relics into the midst of the convention, by eight of its members. Eightysix envoys of the primary assemblies, representing eighty-six departments, walked round the members of the convention, and unrolled from one hand to the other, around the national representation, a long tricoloured ribbon, which seemed to enchain the deputies in the bonds of the country. A national fascis, crowned with olive branches, exemplified the reconciliation and the unity of the members of the republic. The foundlings in their cradles, the deaf and dumb conversing in the language of signs which science had given them; the ashes of heroes who had died for their country, enclosed in urns, whereon their names were inscribed; a triumphal car, surrounded by the labourer, his wife and his children; and, lastly, tumbrils loaded, as if they were vile spoils, with fragments of tiaras, sceptres, crowns, and broken arms all these symbols of slavery, superstition, pride, benevolence, labour, glory, innocence, rural life, and warlike virtue marched behind the representatives. Close by a station before Les Invalides, where the multitude saluted its own image in a colossal statue of the people trampling on federalism,

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the crowd dispersed itself over the Champ-de-Mars. The representatives and established corps ranged themselves upon the steps of the altar of the country. A million heads bristled upon the sloping steps of this immense amphitheatre; a million voices swore to defend the principles of the social code, presented by Hérault de Séchelles to the acceptation of the republic. The salvos of cannon seemed themselves to swear extermination to the foes of the country.d

CARLYLE ON THE NEW CALENDAR

As to the New Calendar, we may say here rather than elsewhere that speculative men have long been struck with the inequalities and incongruities of the Old Calendar; that a New one has long been as good as determined on. Maréchal the Atheist, almost ten years ago, proposed a New Calendar, free at least from superstition: this the Paris Municipality would now adopt, in defect of a better; at all events, let us have either this of Maréchal's or a better, the New Era being come. Petitions, more than once, have been sent to that effect; and indeed, for a year past, all Public Bodies, Journalists, and Patriots in general, have dated "First Year of the Republic." It is a subject not without difficulties. But the Convention has taken it up; and Romme, as we say, has been meditating it; not Maréchal's New Calendar, but a better New one of Romme's and our own. Romme, aided by a Monge, a Lagrange and others, furnishes mathematics; Fabre d'Églantine furnishes poetic nomenclature: and so, on the 5th of October, 1793, after trouble enough, they bring forth this New Republican Calendar of theirs, in a complete state; and by Law, get it put in action.

Four equal Seasons, Twelve equal Months of Thirty days each; this makes three hundred and sixty days; and five odd days remain to be disposed of. The five odd days we will make Festivals, and name the five Sansculottides, or Days without Breeches. Festival of Genius; Festival of Labour; of Actions; of Rewards; of Opinion: these are the five Sansculottides. Whereby the great Circle, or Year, is made complete: solely every fourth year, whilom called Leap-year, we introduce a sixth Sansculottide and name it Festival of the Revolution. Now as to the day of commencement, which offers difficulties, is it not one of the luckiest coincidences that the Republic herself commenced on the 21st of September; close on the Autumnal Equinox? Autumnal Equinox, at midnight for the meridian of Paris, in the year whilom Christian 1792, from that moment shall the New Era reckon itself to begin. Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire; or as one might say, in mixed English, Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious: these are our three Autumn months. Nivôse, Pluviose, Ventôse, or say, Snowous, Rainous, Windous, make our Winter season. Germinal, Floréal, Prairial, or Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal, are our Spring season. Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor, that is to say (dor being Greek for gift) Reapidor, Heatidor, Fruitidor, are Republican Summer. These Twelve, in a singular manner, divide the Republican Year. Then as to minuter subdivisions, let us venture at once on a bold stroke: adopt your decimal subdivision; and instead of the world-old Week, or Se'ennight, make it a Tennight, or Décade; -not without results. There are three Decades, then, in each of the months; which is very regular; and the Décadi, or Tenth-day, shall always be the "Day of Rest.' And the Christian Sabbath, in that case? Shall shift for itself!

This, in brief, is the New Calendar of Romme and the Convention; calculated for the meridian of Paris, and Gospel of Jean Jacques: not one

'Strange to sav. Carlyle savs "Vernal" Equinox. 1