Charlotte Corday by Paul Jacques Aime Baudry (1860)
Today is the anniversary of the birth, in 1768, of Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont, the idealistic young provincial aristocrat who went to Paris and assassinated that Jacobin dog Jean-Paul Marat in his bath during the French Revolution, going to the guillotine herself for committing the murder.
In one of his Bertie & Jeeves short stories entitled “Comrade Bingo”, P.G. Wodehouse has young Bingo Little fall madly in love with a woman named Charlotte Corday Rowbotham, the daughter of a Communist agitator. Bingo goes so far as to don a fake beard, haranguing the workers and scaring the devil out of his rich uncle in order to impress the gel. (Jeeves, of course, is able to break up Bingo’s ridiculous infatuation and save the day with his usual deft skill.)
I must confess that I have never understood what ol’ Plum had in mind naming the gel after Corday. If her father is such a leftist, why would he honor the assassin of another one? Perhaps I just don’t get the joke. Perhaps Plum’s own historickal memory was a bit sketchy on the point. In any event, I can’t help thinking of his story whenever I see a reference to the original Charlotte Corday.
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July 29, 2010 at 5:08 pm
mothe
Don’t you think P G’s idea was to convey that her family meant her to for a terrifying political activist. (Well, it isn’t funny when explained.) Poor Mlle de Corday, what a subject for a tragedy. Her family utterly repudiated her for her deed, even after it was no longer dangerous not to do so, never even mentioning her name again. But in truth Marat, in spite of David’s masterly propaganda, was the 1790 equivalent of old Joe Goebbels, a filth-talking homicidal maniac and advocate of murdering other people, deeply implicated in the September Massacres, which horrified even Danton. I for one cannot rate his loss as a great blow for humanity. By the bye, the French painter got the scene all wrong, at least Mlle de Corday’s bit. She was wearing a large hat, as all respectable women at the time would have when out of their own houses; she had had her hair dressed and powdered a la reine, oddly enough still quite fashionable: the effect was supposed to imitate the ash blond hair of the Queen; and instead of standing about looking tragic after the deed, she sensibly legged it for the front door, hoping to escape. Of course she did not. Her great beauty and her dignity during her trial and execution excited a good bit of awe and admiration. Her character was to say the least mixed. A devout Catholic, she had at one time thought of taking the veil. She was an intense supporter of the earlier, more idealistic phases of the Revolution, and she came to loathe Marat and his ilk for what she correctly saw as its corruption and debasement at their hands. Although she must have been gravely conflicted by the idea of committing a such a sin, she imagined that her act would help to save the more moderate revolutionists; ironically the murder in fact helped precipitate the Reign of Terror and the rise to power of the monstrous Robespierre.