Her death took place in November of 1726. And
the story runs that on her death-bed she delivered
to a person of trust a letter to her sometime husband,
now King George I. of England. Seven months later,
as King George was on his way to his beloved Hanover,
that letter was placed in his carriage as it crossed
the frontier into Germany. It contained Sophia’s
dying declaration of innocence, and her solemn summons
to King George to stand by her side before the judgment-seat
of Heaven within a year, and there make answer in
her presence for the wrongs he had done her, for her
blighted life and her miserable death.
King George’s answer to that summons was immediate.
The reading of that letter brought on the apoplectic
seizure of which he died in his carriage next day—the
9th of June, 1727—on the road to Osnabruck.
Charlotte Corday and Jean Paul Morat
Tyrannicide was the term applied to her deed by Adam
Lux, her lover in the sublimest and most spiritual
sense of the word—for he never so much
as spoke to her, and she never so much as knew of
his existence.
The sudden spiritual passion which inflamed him when
he beheld her in the tumbril on her way to the scaffold
is a fitting corollary to her action. She in
her way and he in his were alike sublime; her tranquil
martyrdom upon the altar of Republicanism and his
exultant martyrdom upon the altar of Love were alike
splendidly futile.
It is surely the strangest love-story enshrined in
history. It has its pathos, yet leaves no regrets
behind, for there is no might-have-been which death
had thwarted. Because she died, he loved her;
because he loved her, he died. That is all, but
for the details which I am now to give you.
The convent-bred Marie Charlotte Corday d’Armont
was the daughter of a landless squire of Normandy,
a member of the chetive noblesse, a man of gentle
birth, whose sadly reduced fortune may have predisposed
him against the law of entail or primogeniture—
the prime cause of the inequality out of which were
sprung so many of the evils that afflicted France.
Like many of his order and condition he was among
the earliest converts to Republicanism—
the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding constitutional
government of the people by the people, holding monarchical
and aristocratic rule an effete and parasitic anachronism.
From M. de Corday Charlotte absorbed the lofty Republican
doctrines to which anon she was to sacrifice her life;
and she rejoiced when the hour of awakening sounded
and the children of France rose up and snapped the
fetters in which they had been trammelled for centuries
by an insolent minority of their fellow-countrymen.
In the early violence of the revolution she thought
she saw a transient phase—horrible, but
inevitable in the dread convulsion of that awakening.
Soon this would pass, and the sane, ideal government
of her dreams would follow—must follow,
since among the people’s elected representatives
was a goodly number of unselfish, single-minded men
of her father’s class of life; men of breeding
and education, impelled by a lofty altruistic patriotism;
men who gradually came to form a party presently to
be known as the Girondins.
