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Charlotte Corday was 24. Baudry gives her no horror and no triumph, only a woman who has done it and stayed in the room.

This museum already hangs the other version of this room. David's Marat, painted within weeks of the killing, makes the dead man look like a martyr in a church painting and erases the woman completely: no Corday, no struggle, only a saint in a bathtub. It took France 67 years to paint the reply, and this is it: same tub, same dead man, same July evening in 1793, seen from the other side. Charlotte Corday was 24, a country nobleman's daughter from Normandy with a convent education and a Plutarch habit. She was a fifth-generation descendant of the playwright Corneille. She had watched Marat's newspaper call, week after week, for heads by the hundred thousand. She had watched the Girondin deputies she admired thrown out of the Convention and hunted down. She traveled to Paris alone and bought a kitchen knife with a 5-inch blade at the Palais Royal. Then she talked her way into the apartment on the rue des Cordeliers by promising names of traitors at Caen. Marat, confined to a medicinal bath by a skin disease that was eating him alive, wrote the names down and told her they would be guillotined within days. It was, in effect, the confession she had come to collect. She put the knife through his chest with one blow, and she did not run. At her trial she was asked who had put her up to it. Her answer unsettled the prosecutors more than defiance would have. No one, she said: she had planned it alone, and she had killed one man to save a hundred thousand. She went to the guillotine 4 days later with a composure the newspapers could not explain. What came after produced two of the Revolution's strangest footnotes. A carpenter named Legros lifted the severed head and slapped the cheek, and witnesses swore the cheek flushed. He got 3 months in prison, and the report fed a century of medical argument about what a severed head knows. And the Jacobins, certain no woman could have done this unprompted, ordered an autopsy to prove a lover's hand behind her. The autopsy proved only that the republic's investigators had run out of ideas. Lamartine, writing in 1847, gave her the name that stuck: the angel of assassination. Baudry painted her in 1860, for a France arguing about its Revolution all over again. She stands upright against a wall map of the country she said she was saving, Normandy level with her shoulder. The knife lies on the board across the tub. A copy of Marat's own newspaper, the Publiciste, lies creased on the floor beside the overturned chair. The picture went to the Salon of 1861. Théophile Gautier praised it, Maxime du Camp did not, and it hangs in Nantes now. David's version is the greater painting. This one is the more complete report.