Been getting my hands dirty with everything Révolution Française recently, while trying to decide how to best capture some of the characters in this fascinating, volatile, and fervently debated time in our history.
In steps Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont: a small town girl from an impoverished aristocratic family who quietly packed up a trunk, left for Paris without telling a soul, and tracked down the radical voice of the Revolution, Monsieur Jean-Paul Marat, at his home... where she promptly stabbed him to death in his bath, and just as suddenly, became all the talk of Paris.
This is a re-imagining of what Charlotte Corday may have packed in her truck for her mission.
1:
--Corday’s traveling trunk– Inside the red blouse she would wear to her execution by guillotine- a symbol of a traitor to the revolution who had assassinated a representative of the people.
2:
--A copy of Marat’s newspaper L'Ami du people, soaked in his blood. No artistic license here, that stained paper has survived since 1793 and is viewable online.
--A penner- a traveling writing case that would contain an ink and a quill.
--The “corday” or mob cap that Corday made for herself after her arrest. She is depicted wearing the same cap in the portrait she sat for 3 hours before her execution.
--The letter Corday wrote to Marat seeking an audience with him.
--The 6 inch kitchen knife Corday purchased in Paris.
--The fashionable hat most media depicted Corday wearing when she stabbed Marat, adorned with the revolutionary cockade pin.
-- Corday’s signature– pulled from her surviving letters.
3:
--A copy of Plutarch’s Parellel Lives which Corday brought to Paris with her.
--A wooden comb and a patch box filled with powder.
--The (alleged) open Bible found in her hotel room, with the passage of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes underlined.
--The portrait Corday asked to be painted of herself while she waited for her execution in the Conciergerie.
--And a cut piece of her hair, which she gave to the artist Jean-Jacques Hauer as payment. (Her hair by protocol would also have been cut to avoid being caught in the guillotine.)
Liberté, égalité, fraternité!
