Laurent Basse, who fells Charlotte to the floor with a chair, for Marat's trull to trample upon her, the tumult, vociferations, increasing every moment in volume and violence, as soldiers and mob come trampling, hurrying in, (the soldiers first, happily for the swooning Jeanne Darc of Liberty, or she would have been torn piecemeal,)—the binding her with cords, the insults, imprecations heaped upon her, by way of chorus to an oration, after Plutarch, over the dead body, by a drunken Cordelier; which finished, the wretched girl, who has fainted from excess of terror, is with difficulty escorted through the cursing crowd to the Abbaye prison !

The enlightened, magnanimous people of Paris have not, then, at once recognised their deliverer, as Charlotte Corday had half persuaded herself they would. On the contrary, whilst she, hardly yet recovered from that trance of terror, can scarcely realize the full horror of her position, they, the delivered people, are decreeing the honours of the Panthéon ("Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante") to Jean-Paul Marat,-thrusting out Mirabeau's coffin therefrom to make room for his, over which young girls cast flowers, orators utter inconceivable blasphemies in his honour, and David, carried away by the general enthusiasm, undertakes to paint his portrait!

Still, a revulsion of opinion may one day take place in the popular mind as to the relative deservings of Jean-Paul Marat and Charlotte Corday, and the pale prisoner, rousing herself from the torpor of despair into which she had been for many hours plunged, feels anxious that her possible apotheosis should lack nothing of completeness, and with that view writes thus to the Committee of the Salut-Public:

"Citizens,-Since I have but a few hours to live, may I hope that you will permit me to have my portrait taken? I

should be glad to leave this token of myself to my friends: and as we cherish the likeness of good citizens, so curiosity causes us to set a value upon that of great criminals, in order to perpetuate horror of their crimes. If you deign to grant my request, I beg you to send me a miniature-painter."

This assuredly neither great, angelic, nor demonic thought was not heeded by the citizens to whom it was addressed, who, for all answer, transferred the writer first to the Conciergerie, and early on the following day, Wednesday, the 17th, to the hall above the vaults of that prison where sat the Revolutionary Tribunal. Before ascending thereto, Charlotte Corday carefully arranged her hair and dress; and so vivid was the impression of her beauty upon the thronging crowd of spectators, that the curses which leapt to their lips as she entered the judgment-hall were arrested in the utterance, and followed by a confused, involuntary murmur of admiration. Moreover, the anxious wish she had expressed, that that beauty should be pictorially perpetuated, was unexpectedly gratified by the presence amongst the auditory of a M. Hauer, a portrait-painter; and Charlotte was no sooner aware that he was sketching her likeness, than, without interrupting the long, tedious formality of interrogation and trial to which she was subjected, she contrived to so place herself that the artist should have every possible facility for the complete accomplishment of his task-Was this Roman heroism, or-delirious vanity?

The slayer of the "martyred Marat" was doomed to immediate death, and Charlotte Corday, returned to her prison-cell, passed the few minutes that elapsed before the arrival of the executioner and cart by sitting to M. Hauer, in order that he might perfect his work; chatting the while upon the events of the day, and the "peace" she had ensured

to France by the sacrifice of her own life;-a colloquy interrupted by the entrance of the headsman with the red chemise on his arm, the scissors in his hand. "So soon!" faltered the hapless woman. Ay! the preparations were complete, and the sovereign people, to whom she had given "peace," impatient to behold her on the way to the scaffold; to see that charming head fall into the basket.

Her long black hair was then shorn off—a lock given as a remembrance to M. Hauer-the red chemise put on,-her arms were pinioned, and having declined the services of a priest, the blood of Marat and her own being the only sacrifices she could offer to the Eternal, Charlotte Corday mounted the cart and confronted the yelling multitude, whose maledictions, vociferate as they might, could, however, be only partially heard amidst the heavy thunder-claps, the driving rain, and howling wind of the furious storm which at that moment burst over Paris. The summer tempest was brief as fierce, and that fearful ride was not half accomplished, when the dark clouds rolled away, the setting sun shone forth upon the wet, shrinking form, and kindled the pale face of the self-immolated girl, as with the new-born hope of an immortality other than that given by Plutarchs and painters—not purchased by the blood of Marat or her own—and which was, let us hope, realized even as Legros, one of the executioners, struck the cheek with one hand, as he showed to the shouting multitude the head of Charlotte Corday with the other!

Immediately young Franquelin heard of this catastrophe, he withdrew with his mother to an obscure cottage in Normandy, where he languished for a few months only; and the last request that trembled upon his dying lips was, that the letters and portrait of his adored Charlotte should be buried with him.

MADAME RECAMIER.

ULIETTE BERNARD was born at Lyons on the 3rd

JULIETT

of December, 1777, in the Rue de Cage, and was placed as a permanent boarder in the Abbaye des Chartreux, near that city, at a very tender age, by her parents, whom unprosperous circumstances compelled to seek a new home in Paris. Pretty convent-inmates are by no means uncommon in France, true as it may be that that country is better entitled to boast of the acquired elegance and grace of its females than of their natural beauty of person; but as Juliette Bernard grew to girlhood, her dazzling, celestial loveliness (une beauté éblouissante-céleste) gradually became the exhaustless theme, not only of the ordinary frequenters of the Abbey Church, but of the citizens of Lyons, who, crowding thither on days of high festival, when only she could be seen, could hardly believe, as they looked upon her angel-face and drank in the thrilling strains of her exquisite voice, that she was a being of mortal mould, and formed of the same dull earth as themselves. There is no exaggeration in this language, if faith can be placed in the recorded testimonies of persons of every age, condition, and taste, that have written or spoken of this remarkable lady; of men and women,-the old, the middle-aged, the young,of emperors and popes, soldiers and saints, poets and philosophers, whose unanimous suffrages present a universality of homage, the sincerity of which cannot be questioned. Unhappily for her, the fame of her beauty had found far wider echoes by the time she had reached her fifteenth

birthday; and, amongst others, M. Récamier, a wealthy Paris banker of about four times her age, having first ascertained by the evidence of his own eyes that rumour had not overrated her personal attractions, presented himself to her parents as a suitor for the divine Juliette's hand. M. Récamier made no vain parade of sentiment or affection; he was well known to be a man who piqued himself upon surpassing all others in the splendour of his mansion, his furniture, his equipages, and he was consequently ambitious of obtaining an incomparable wife. The father readily consented to the rich man's proposal-Madame Bernard with some reluctance. It was not the custom in France then, any more than it is now, to consult a daughter in the choice of a husband; and the legal abduction of the beautiful Juliette, which immediately followed the conclusion of the businessbargain by which she was disposed of, from the tranquil retreat where she had passed so many happy years, to weda word she hardly understood—a stranger old enough to have been her grandfather, is thus described by Madame Récamier herself:-"On the evening of the day my aunt was to take me from the convent, I went to the apartment of the abbess to receive her benediction; and the next morning, I passed, bitterly weeping, out of the gate I did not remember to have seen opened to receive me, to find myself in a carriage with my aunt, and we set off for Paris. I pass with regret from an epoch so calm, so pure, to enter upon one full of agitation. It returns to me, sometimes, like a sweet, vague dream, with its clouds of incense, its multiplied ceremonies, its processions in gardens, its hymns and its flowers."

M. Récamier's ambition was fully gratified: all heads bowed down in delighted acknowledgment of his young