The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when he beheld
her in the tumbril on her way to the scaffold is a fitting
corollary to her action. She in her way and he in his were alike
sublime; her tranquil martyrdom upon the altar of Republicanism
and his exultant martyrdom upon the altar of Love were alike
splendidly futile.
It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in history. It
has its pathos, yet leaves no regrets behind, for there is no
might-have-been which death had thwarted. Because she died, he
loved her; because he loved her, he died. That is all, but for
the details which 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.
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