That was all. The fiction that she was going to England was intended to save him pain. For she had so laid her plans that her identity should remain undisclosed. She would seek Marat in the very Hall of the Convention, and publicly slay him in his seat. Thus Paris should behold Nemesis overtaking the false Republican in the very Assembly which he corrupted, and anon should adduce a moral from the spectacle of the monster’s death. For herself she counted upon instant destruction at the hands of the furious spectators. Thus, thinking to die unidentified, she trusted that her father, hearing, as all France must hear, the great tidings that Marat was dead, would never connect her with the instrument of Fate shattered by the fury of the mob. You realize, then, how great and how terrible was the purpose of this maid of twenty-five, who so demurely took her seat in the Paris diligence on that July morning of the Year 2 of the Republic—1793, old style. She was becomingly dressed in brown cloth, a lace fichu folded across her well-developed breast, a conical hat above her light brown hair. She was of a good height and finely proportioned, and her carriage as full of dignity as of grace. Her skin was of such white loveliness that a contemporary compares it with the lily. Like Athene, she was gray-eyed, and, like Athene, noble-featured, the oval of her face squaring a little at the chin, in which there was a cleft. Calm was her habit, calm her slow-moving eyes, calm and deliberate her movements, and calm the mind reflected in all this. And as the heavy diligence trundles out of Caen and takes the open country and the Paris road, not even the thought of the errand upon which she goes, of her death-dealing and death-receiving mission, can shake that normal calm. Here is no wild exaltation, no hysterical obedience to hotly-conceived impulse. Here is purpose, as cold as it is lofty, to liberate France and pay with her life for the privilege of doing so. That lover of hers, whom we are presently to see, has compared her ineptly with Joan of Arc, that other maid of France. But Joan moved with pomp in a gorgeous pageantry, amid acclamations, sustained by the heady wine of combat and of enthusiasm openly indulged, towards a goal of triumph. Charlotte travelled quietly in the stuffy diligence with the quiet conviction that her days were numbered. So normal did she appear to her travelling companions, that one among them, with an eye for beauty, pestered her with amorous attentions, and actually proposed marriage to her before the coach had rolled over the bridge of Neuilly into Paris two days later.