According to his usual custom, Marat wore a soiled handkerchief bound round his head, increasing his natural hideousness. A coarse covering was thrown across his bath; a board, likewise placed transversely, supported his papers. Laying down his pen, he asked Charlotte the purport of her visit. The closet was so narrow that she touched the bath near which she stood. She gazed on him with ill-disguised horror and disgust, but answered as composedly as she could, that she had come from Caen, in order to give him correct intelligence concerning the proceedings of the Girondists there. He listened, questioned her eagerly, wrote down the name of the Girondists, then added with a smile of triumph— “Before a week, they shall have perished on the guillotine.” “These words,” afterward said Charlotte, “sealed his fate.” Drawing from beneath the handkerchief which covered her bosom, the knife she had kept there all along, she plunged it to the hilt in Marat’s heart. He gave one loud expiring cry for help, and sank back dead in the bath. By an instinctive impulse, Charlotte had instantly drawn out the knife from the breast of her victim, but she did not strike again; casting it down at his feet, she left the closet and sat down in a neighboring room, thoughtfully passing her hand across her brow: her task was done. The wife of Marat had rushed to his aid, on hearing his cry for help. Laurent Basse, seeing that all was over, turned round toward Charlotte, and with a blow of a chair felled her to the floor, whilst the infuriated Albertine trampled her under her feet. The tumult aroused the other tenants of the house; the alarm spread, and a crowd gathered in the apartment, who learned with stupor that Marat, the Friend of the People, had been murdered. Deeper still was their wonder when they gazed on the murderess. She stood there before them with still disordered garments, and her disheveled hair, loosely bound by a broad green ribbon, falling around her; but so calm, so serenely lovely, that those who most abhorred her crime gazed on her with involuntary admiration. “Was she then so beautiful?” was the question addressed many years afterward, to on old man, one of the few remaining witnesses of this scene. “Beautiful!” he echoed enthusiastically, adding with the eternal regrets of old age: “Ay, there are none such now!” The commissary of police began his interrogatory in the saloon of Marat’s apartment. She told him her name, how long she had been in Paris, confessed her crime, and recognized the knife with which it had been perpetrated. The sheath was found in her pocket, with a thimble, some thread, money, and her watch. “What was your motive in assassinating Marat?” asked the commissary. “To prevent a civil war,” she answered. “Who are your accomplices?” “I have none.”