Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday d'Armont

(1768–1793)

Her Life

Charlotte Corday came from a family of ruined aristocrats in the Normandy region, in the town of Caen, who were related to Pierre Corneille (1606-1684). An adherent to the philosophies of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Corneille’s tragic verse plays confront grand moral themes with eloquent style. His influence formed Corday’s character, and she continued her life as an irreconcilable idealist. She went to school at the Abbaye aux Dames, a convent in Caen, and is said to have enjoyed reading Plutarch and the Old Testament story of Judith.

 

In 1789, when Jacobin politician Jean-Paul Marat had 22 Girondists arrested, Corday birthed a plan to assassinate him. This was spurred by the beheading of King Louis XVI and Jacques Pierre Brissot’s censure of Marat.

 

With Plutarch's Parallel Lives in her possession, she came to Paris on July 9, and procured a room at the Hotel de Providence. Purchasing a table knife at the Palais-Royal, she moved closer to action. She then detailed her reasons for the murder in what she intended as a speech to the French people.

 

The Assassination

Believing Marat to be the progenitor of all the country’s problems, when she first approached him with the intention of assassinating him, she was turned away by the politician’s common-law wife, Simonne Evrard.  Upon her second visit, she brought a note:

 

I come from Caen.  Your love for the country ought to make you anxious to know the plots that are being laid there.  I await your reply.

 

When she was admitted to see Marat on her third visit, she gave him the names of 18 Girdonist deputies from the Convention. Corday noted that Marat’s reply was, “I will soon  have them guillotined.”  She would use this statement as her defense for the murder, holding it up as proof of his cruelty.  However, in earlier statements, she had been quoted as saying that Marat had merely said, “They will soon be guillotined,” a slightly less haughty averment, and possibly closer to the truth, as Marat, though influential, was not at that time powerful enough to have ordered these executions.

 

As Marat sat in his sabat, Corday took the knife from her corset and buried it in the man’s upper torso. A later autopsy revealed that both the left ventricle of his lung and his aorta were pierced. It is said that Marat’s final word before dying were “A moi, ma chère amie!”("With me, my dear friend"). This is the moment immortalized in Jacques-Louis David's painting The Death of Marat.

 

After she stabbed Marat, she was bound with her hands behind her back and searched. She was found to be in possession of a watch made in Caen, her passport, and a large sum of money; the latter item indicating that the murder was possibly a well-financed operation. Soon, several officials of the Committee of General Security were on the scene. One investigator, seeing a document poking from Corday’s corset, made an attempt to confiscate it. Confusion ensued as Corday resisted the man’s hand coming toward her breast.  The struggle resulted in the entire bodice ripping open, exposing the breasts of the female assassin.  The document itself was a second letter, intended for delivery should she not be allowed access to Marat. It reads:

 

I wrote to you this morning, Marat, have you received my letter? I could not believe you had, as they refused me admittance; I trust that to-morrow you will accord me an interview. I repeat that I come from Caen. I have secrets to reveal to you of the utmost importance to the safety of the Republic. Besides all this, I am persecuted for the cause of liberty. I am unhappy; this itself is sufficient to give me a claim on your protection.

 

During her trial, Corday testified she had acted alone; nevertheless, she did implicate other Girondists, including Deputy Claude-Romain Lauze-Duperret (see section on Duperret). She is famous for saying, "I killed one man to save 100,000," an allusion to Robespierre's preamble to the slaughter of King Louis XVI. Ultimately, it was her romanticism that made the elimination of Marat possible for her, as “She had imagined herself stabbing Marat through the heart in front of the assembled senate, just as Brutus had immolated Caesar, his patron and friend, to restore liberty to the country” (Loomis 19, 112).

 

Her Legacy

Corday was a willing sacrificial lamb for her cause, though the Parisian population was not in sympathy with her, as she was nearly torn to pieces while being transported from the Revolutionary Tribunal to the guillotine.

 

Under Napoleonic revisionism, Marat’s policies came to be seen as atrocities, and Corday assumed legendary status a heroine of France. Before that would happen, Marat would enjoy a martyrdom that would see busts of the Jacobin replace crucifixes and other religious symbols that were antithetical to the values of the new administration. The assassination actually accelerated the agenda of the Jacobins, and perhaps led inevitably to the Reign of Terror. Oddly, an anti-female perspective many revolutionary leaders held was amplified by Corday's deed. This malicious misogyny indirectly led to the execution of Marie Antoinette, the king's detained widow.

 

Claude Chauveau-Lagarde, also legal counsel for Marie-Antoinette, was Corday’s attorney. The President of the Tribunal had ordered him to enter a plea of insanity. This was not an attempt to save Corday’s life, but a stab at castigating the patriotic character she had assumed. Because he respected Corday but could not flout the president’s edict, Chauveau-Lagarde asserted, "This incredible calm… this complete tranquillity and abnegation which in their way are sublime, are not natural" (Loomis, 144-145). Thus Chauveau-Lagarde a reserved reverence for the woman, while reinforcing a representation of Corday as a patriot.

 

 

Our Charlotte’s “Sleeping Sickness”

 

Weiss’s Corday is played by a patient with “sleeping sickness,” and “melancholia.” The former most probably translates into the diagnosis known as narcolepsy:

 

[…] a chronic neurological disorder caused by the brain's inability to regulate sleep-wake cycles normally. At various times throughout the day, people with narcolepsy experience fleeting urges to sleep. If the urge becomes overwhelming, individuals will fall asleep for periods lasting from a few seconds to several minutes. In rare cases, some people may remain asleep for an hour or longer.  In addition to excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), three other major symptoms frequently characterize narcolepsy: cataplexy, or the sudden loss of voluntary muscle tone; vivid hallucinations during sleep onset or upon awakening; and brief episodes of total paralysis at the beginning or end of sleep.  Narcolepsy is not definitively diagnosed in most patients until 10 to 15 years after the first symptoms appear. The cause of narcolepsy remains unknown.  It is likely that narcolepsy involves multiple factors interacting to cause neurological dysfunction and sleep disturbances.

 

An excellent rendering of narcoleptic symptoms may be seen in Gus Van Sant’s film, My Own Private Idaho.

 

347 DSM-IV Criteria for Narcolepsy:

 

• Each day for three months or more, the patient has had irresistible attacks of refreshing sleep.
• The patient experiences either or both of these:
• Cataplexy (sudden, brief loss of muscle tone bilaterally, usually associated with intense emotion)
• Intrusions of REM sleep into transitions between waking ans sleping, as shown by either of these:
• Hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, or
• Sleep paralysis at the beginning or end of sleep
• These symptoms are not directly caused by a general medical condition or by the use of substances, including medications.

 

A Case Study of a Narcoleptic Patient

 

It’s been happening like this for several years.  Only now it’s worse,” said Eric Flowers, Emma’s husband.  He had brought her to the clinic because she no longer felt she could drive safely.

 

Emma herself was slumped in the interview chair next to him.  Her chin rested on her chest, and he left arm hung down at her side. She had been soundly asleep for several minutes. “If she hadn’t been sitting down, she’d have fallen down,” said Eric.  “I’ve had to catch her half a dozen times.”

 

As a teenager, Emma had had vivid, sometimes frightening dreams that occurred as she was going to sleep, even if it was only a brief afternoon nap.  By the time she married Eric, she was having occasional “sleep attack,” when she would find the urge to lie down and take a brief nap irresistible.  Over the next several years, these naps occurred with increasing frequency.  Now, at age 28, Emma found herself napping for 10 minutes or so every three or four hours during the day.  Her nighttime sleep seemed entirely normal.

 

It was the falling attacks that had prompted the evaluation. At first Emma noticed only a sort of weakness in her neck muscles when she felt sleepy.  Over the course of a year the weakness had increased, until now if affected every voluntary muscle in her body.  It could happen at any time, but usually it was associated with the onset of sudden sleepiness.  At these times she seemed to lose all of her strength, sometimes so suddenly that she didn’t even have time to sit down.  Then she would collapse, right where she had been standing.  Today it had happened while she was sitting down.  Once it had happened while she was trying to park her car.  She had seen a neurologist the month before, but an EEG had revealed no evidence of seizure disorder, and an MRI was normal.

 

Emma stirred, yawned, and opened her eyes.  “I did it again, didn’t I?”

 

“Feeling better?” asked her husband.

 

“I always do, don’t I?”