Word: marat
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...grandiose proposals, when in the hot summer of 1793, Charlotte de Corday sat in a dim house in Caen, embroidering on a piece of silk the question: "Shall I, shall I not?" A cool, gracious, studious maiden of 24, she was asking herself if she should assassinate Jean-Paul Marat, President of the Jacobins, diseased, crippled, doomed fanatic who called himself "the rage of the people." The mood of ecstasy that Charlotte de Corday, as a follower of Rousseau, had experienced when the Declaration of the Rights of Man was published had long since given way to disillusion, foreboding...
Born near Geneva, Marat was the son of a poor chemist. He studied medicine in Scotland, became expert in several languages, took up science. Fearless, bitter, he possessed a quick, vivid pen, turned it to account, after the overthrow of the French monarchy, with violent and inflammatory pamphlets. He gradually became powerful as a spokesman for the extreme Left, the "true type," according to Joseph Shearing, "of the low agitator of the Paris gutters." Terribly ugly, 5 ft. tall but with an enormous head, he suffered with eczema so badly that it was commonly believed he had leprosy. Charlotte...
...BLACK CONSUL - Anatolu Vinogradov- Viking ($2.75). In this historical novel of Haiti and the French Revolution by a Soviet author, Toussaint l'Ouverture. Robespierre, Marat, Lafayette and other great men of the epoch take the stage. Vinogradov's method of fictionalizing history is to incorporate verbatim reports taken from original sources into his stories. Thus the unsuspecting reader is treated to actual state papers, speeches, documents. Vinogradov may have been the first historical novelist to make extensive use of this method, but Guy Endore. U. S. novelist, employed the same technique in Babouk, his novel of a West...
...down with an oak stake through his heart while a priest reads the Lord's Prayer backward. Devoutly French politicians wished it were as easy to keep Alexandre ("Sacha") Stavisky in his grave. On the boulevards Alexandre Stavisky, in wax, shared honors with the original tub in which Marat was stabbed, star exhibits in the venerable Musee Grevin...
...vermin-ridden prison on the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, built on the site of the still more ancient leprosery of St. Lazare, has held France's women prisoners, specially harlots. One of St. Lazare's first notable prisoners was Charlotte Corday, bath-stabber of Terrorist Marat. One of its more recent inmates was the equally publicized Spy Mata Hari. U. S. inmates have included the Comtesse de Janze, the former Alice Silverthorne of Chicago, for shooting her lover (whom she later married) and Mrs. Ruth Putnam Mason, author and actress, for passing worthless checks. On the site...