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Baudry paints her listening to the footsteps in the corridor. At the trial she testified she had planned it entirely alone, which was the frightening part.

This museum already hangs the other version of this room. David's Marat, painted within weeks of the killing, gives the dead man a pietà and erases the woman entirely: 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 dying man, same July evening in 1793, with the perspective corrected. Charlotte Corday was 24, a magistrate's granddaughter from Normandy with a convent education and a Plutarch habit. She had watched Marat's newspaper call, week after week, for heads by the hundred thousand, and watched the Girondin deputies she admired proscribed and hunted. She traveled to Paris alone, bought a kitchen knife with a five-inch blade at the Palais Royal, and 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, severed the artery, and did not run. At her trial she was asked who had put her up to it and gave the answer that unsettled the prosecutors more than defiance would have: no one; she had planned it alone; she had killed one man, she said, to save a hundred thousand. She managed her own execution four days later with a composure the newspapers could not explain, and the aftermath produced two of the Revolution's strangest footnotes: a carpenter's assistant lifted the severed head and slapped it, and witnesses swore the cheeks flushed, a report that fueled a century of medical argument about what a head knows; the man was jailed for it. 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, decades later, gave her the name that stuck: the angel of assassination. Baudry painted her in 1860 for a France then busy re-litigating its Revolution: upright against the map of the country she claimed to be saving, Normandy at her shoulder, the knife left in the wound, Marat's own paper on the floor. David's version is the greater painting; this one is the more complete report.