Whilst she was at the conciergerie, a great many persons obtained leave to see her; and all felt the most enthusiastic admiration on beholding a young creature of surpassing loveliness, with endowments that did honor to her sex, and a loftiness of heroism to which few of the stronger sex have attained, who had deliberately executed that which no man in the country had resolution to attempt, though the whole nation wished it, and calmly given up her life for the public weal.

Charlotte's examination before the revolutionary tribunal is remarkable for the dignified simplicity of her answers. I shall only mention one which deserves to be handed down to posterity:

"Accused," said the president, "how happened it that thou couldst reach the heart at the very first blow? Hadst thou been practicing beforehand ?"

Charlotte cast an indescribable look at the questioner.

"Indignation had roused my heart," she replied, "and it showed me the way to his."

When the sentence of death was passed on her, and all her property declared forfeited to the state, she turned to her counsel, M. Chauveau Lagarde,—

"I cannot, sir, sufficently thank you," she said, "for the noble and delicate manner in which you have defended me; and I will at once give you a proof of my gratitude. I have now nothing in the world, and I bequeath to you the few debts I have contracted in my prison. Pray, discharge them for me."

When the executioner came to make preparations for her execution, she entreated him not to cut off her hair.

"It shall not be in your way," she said; and taking her stay lace she tied her thick and beautiful hair on the top of her head, so as not to impede the stroke of the axe.

In her last moments, she refused the assistance of a priest; and upon this is founded a charge of her being an infidel. But there is nothing to justify so foul a blot upon her memory. Charlotte Corday had opened her mind, erroneously perhaps, to freedom of thought in religion as well as in politics. Deeply read in the philosophic writings of the day, she had formed her own notions of faith. She certianly rejected the communion of the Roman Church; and it may be asked, whether

the conduct of the hierarchy of France before the revolution was calculated to convince her that she was in error? But, because she refused the aid of man as a meditator between her and God, is it just to infer that she rejected her Creator? Certainly not. A mind like hers was incapable of existing without religion: and the very action she committed may justify the inference that she anticipated the contemplation, from other than earthly realms, of the happiness of her rescued country.

As the cart in which she was seated proceeded towards the place of execution, a crowd of wretches in the street, ever ready to insult the unfortunate, and glut their eyes with the sight of blood, called out,

"To the gullotine with her!"

"I am on my way thither," she mildly replied, turning towards them.

She was a striking figure as she sat in the cart. The extraordinary beauty of her features, and the mildness of her look, strangely contrasted with the murderer's red garment which she wore. She smiled at the spectators whenever she perceived marks of sympathy rather than of curiosity, and this smile gave a truly Raphaelic expression to her countenance. Adam Lux, a deputy of Mayence, having met the cart, shortly after it left the conciergerie, gazed with wonder at this beautiful apparition-for he had never before seen Charlotte—and a passion, as singular as it was deep, immediately took possession of his mind.

"Oh!" cried he, "this woman is surely greater than Brutus!"

Anxious once more to behold her, he ran at full speed towards the Palais Royal, which he reached before the cart arrived in front of it. Another look which he cast upon Charlotte Corday, completely unsettled his reason. The world to him had suddenly become a void, and he resolved to quit it. Rushing like a mad-man to his own house, he wrote a letter to the revolutionary tribunal, in which he repeated the words he had already uttered at the sight of Charlotte Corday, and concluded by asking to be condemned to death, in order that he might join her in a better world. His request was granted, and he was executed soon after. Before he died, he begged

the executioner to bind him with the very cords that had before encircled the delicate limbs of Charlotte upon the same scaffold, and his head fell as he was pronouncing her name.

Charlotte Corday, wholly absorbed by the solemnity of her last moments, had not perceived the effect she had produced upon Adam Lux, and died in ignorance of it. Having reached the foot of the guillotine, she ascended the platform with a firm step, but with the greatest modesty of demeanor. "Her countenance," says an eye-witness, "evinced only the calmness of a soul at peace with itself."

The executioner having removed the handkerchief which covered her shoulders and bosom, her face and neck became suffused with a deep blush. Death had no terrors for her, but her innate feelings of modesty were deeply wounded at being thus exposed to public gaze. Her being fastened to the fatal plank seemed a relief to her, and she eagerly rushed to death as a refuge against this violation of female delicacy.

When her head fell, the executioner took it up and bestowed a buffet upon one of the cheeks. The eyes, which were already closed, again opened, and cast a look of indignation upon the brute, as if consciousness had survived the separation of the head from the body. This fact, extraordinary as it may seem, has been averred by thousands of eye-witnesses; it has been accounted for in various ways, and no one has ever questioned its truth.

Before Charlotte Corday was taken to execution, she wrote a letter to her father entreating his pardon for having, without his permission, disposed of the life she owed him. Here the lofty-minded heroine again became the meek and submissive daughter-as, upon the scaffold, the energetic and daring woman was nothing but a modest and gentle girl.

The Mountain party, furious at the loss of their leader, attempted to vituperate the memory of Charlotte Corday, by attributing to her motives much less pure and praiseworthy than those which really led to the commission of the deed for which she suffered. They asserted that she was actuated by revenge for the death of a man named Belzunce, who was her lover, and had been executed at Caen upon the denunciation of Marat. But Charlotte Corday was totally unacquainted

with Belzunce-she had never even seen him. More than that, she was never known to have an attachment of the heart.

Her thoughts and feelings were wholly engrossed by the state of her country, and her mind had no leisure for the contemplation of connubial happiness. Her life was, therefore, offered up in the purest spirit of patriotism, unmixed with any worldly passion.

M. Prud'homme relates, that, on the very day of Marat's death, M. Piot, a teacher of the Italian language, called upon him. This gentleman had just left Marat, with whom he had been conversing on the state of the country. The representative, in reply to some observation made by M. Piot, had uttered these remarkable words :

They who govern are a pack of fools. France must have a chief; but to reach this point, blood must be shed, not drop by drop, but in torrents."

"Marat," added M. Piot to M. Prud'homme, "was in his bath, and very ill. This man cannot live a month longer."

When M. Piot was informed that Marat had been murdered, an hour after he had made this communication to M. Prud'homme, he was stricken with a sort of palsy, and would probably have died of fright, had not M. Prud'homme promised not to divulge this singular coincidence.

To the signal disgrace of the French nation, no monument has been raised to the memory of Charlotte Corday, nor is it even known where her remains were deposited; and yet in the noble motive of her conduct, and the immense and generous sacrifice she made of herself, when in the enjoyment of everything that could make life valuable, she has an eternal claim upon the gratitude of her country.

The intrepidity of her character-her resolute courage, and the calmness with which she laid down her life for France, would exalt her memory to a higher pedestal than that attained by the Maid of Orleans, were it not that the human conscience is ever shocked by the assassin's knife, however heroic the motive that wields it.

MADAME DE STAËL.

THIS celebrated woman, whose maiden name was Anna Louisa Germaine Necker, was born in Switzerland, in the year 1766, and was the daughter of the Genevese banker, M. Necker, a man of distinguished parts, and afterwards famous for the high position he occupied in France, being elevated, on account of his financial ability, to the ministry of that department in 1777. During the greater part of the interval between his daughter's birth and that period, she resided in her native country; and having the good-fortune to have a woman of talents for her mother, she was early trained to studious and literary habits. The effects of this became strikingly conspicuous on the settlement of the family in Paris. M. Necker was then the most important person in the government of France, and this elevated position brought him into close connection with all the most noted characters of the day. To the society of literary personages, in particular, his lady and himself were strongly attached; and Marmontel, Raynal, Thomas, and Grimm, with many other celebrated writers of the time, were the daily visitors and intimate friends of the family.

The talents of Mademoiselle Necker, diligently cultivated, as they were, from her very infancy, sprang rapidly to maturity in so congenial a soil as she was now introduced to. At the age of ten or eleven years, indeed, she was in a measure regarded as a prodigy, and but for the remarkable strength of mind which even then distinguished her, she might have been spoiled-the fate of most precocious geniuses. About the time of life we have mentioned, her usual practice was to take her place in the drawing-room at her mother's knee. By and by, Marmontel, or some other wit, would drop in, and stepping up to the little lady's seat, would enter into animated and sensible converse with her, as with a brother or sister wit of full age. At table, she listened with delight to all that fell from the talented guests, and learned incredibly soon to bear a part in their discussions. To this early initiation, no doubt,