The open sea. Edgar Lee Masters
lightning that has struck. Look now! How she writhes here, how passing cross her face Are lights of ghastly fields of fire and clouds When hurricanes descend.
Charlotte
You beast! You beast!
Fouquer-Tinville
I am a beast, eh? You are what? I’ll tell. From Caen, as ’tis known. She’s being sketched, I’ll sketch her too. You see, she’s strongly built, Large eyes of blue, large features, handsome though; Nose shapely, and good teeth; equipped to play In dramas of Corneille, her ancestor. She needs a man. A husband would have drawn Innocuously the electric passion, which Collected in a bolt to loose and lurch Against Marat. All women should be farmed. She has her schooling in a convent, reads; Lives with her thoughts and dreams. I’ll sketch her soul: Has not enough of living to consume The forces of her dreams. She reads Rousseau, And Plutarch’s heroes, Brutus most of all. Thrills at the words “Republic,” “Liberty.” Thinks the Girondists only can set up A real republic. Ideas are the stuff Of history. Kill ideas or be killed By ideas is the fate of man. Republic, Liberty, Brutus are ideas. Ideas Are dangerous, being truths, more so as lies. And lies destroyed Marat.
Who was Marat?
A man of study, learning. Physicist,
Admired of Franklin, Göethe for his works
On heat and light; a doctor, having won
An honorary title at St. Andrew’s
In England. Linguist, speaking Spanish, German,
Italian, English. Versed in Governments:—
You know his work on England’s constitution
Whereby he sought to clear the mind of France—
This Charlotte Corday’s with the rest—that England
Is free, her systems free; stop the Girondists
From that re-iterated lie; stop France
From taking on the English system.
So
True ideas of Marat, evolved from life,
Living and study must combat, destroy
False ideas of Girondists, will succeed;
But cannot bar the door to the idea
That enters at his bathroom with a knife.
How was it that no valet and no guard
Preserved him? Why? Lovers of liberty
Starve in her service!
But there was a time
When he knew elegance and privacy.
But Liberty and Wisdom would be served.
He went to rags, was hunted, had to hide
In sewers for the cause of Liberty;
And there took loathsome trouble, eased at times
By steam, hot tubs. And thus our people’s friend
Is found accessible to this female lie,
Girondist lie, possessing her, and stabbed.
Or at the best ideas of Liberty
Conduct her to his bath-room, where Marat
Is tubbed in sequence and in punishment
Of his idea of Liberty. Gods can laugh,
But men must weep. O worthless, rotten world!
It is most pitiful, most tragic, lifts
Man’s heart to spit at heaven, that these friends
Of peoples must be slain, starved, hunted first,
Then butchered for their service and their love.
Saved not by truth; destroyed by lies, a lie
That he was evil, by the maniac lie
Of her mad vision that she knew what Freedom,
Liberty, Republic mean. Slain by the lie
Of this Girondist dream, this milk and water,
Emasculated, luke-warm craft of states:
Girondists: patches on the robes of kings;
Girondists: autogamists; mating sisters,
The past, and in the mating without child
Of truth or progress. Neither hot nor cold,
Spewed, therefore, from the mouth of Time. Betrayers,
Waylayers of the brave, the clear of eye;
Girondists: ’twixt republicans and kings,
And holding hands of each to make them friends.
Workers and owners of the new foaled mule
Bred of the royal stallion and an ass.
Girondists! loving wealth and ease, the church
Which loves them too. Girondists picking steps
Of moderate reform. Girondists hating
The Revolution, which must kill the foes
Of Liberty, as criminals are killed
For robbery, yet rejoice to see the blood
Of dead Marat. They’re lofty! They are pure!
They love the laws, love peace! Yes, as this woman
Loves law and peace.
What is it like? A play
Where all is mimicked. Do we talk of facts?
Are these not fautocinni? Where’s the hand
That plays this coarse and bloody joke to eyes
Of men that crave reality? I mean this:
A woman with lovers who suggest, abet;
A woman with no man, who dreams and reads,
Lives in the stench of these Girondist lies;
Ghosts float on fogs of her miasmic soul.
She hears Marat’s a monster, dabbling blood,
A rabid ignoramus running foul
Of liberty and order, nihilist,
And sanguinary madman, dragon slimed
In back-wash of all hatred, envy, lust
Of the dispossessed, malformed, misborn; and then
She dreams of Brutus, who struck down—there now
I nail a lie that will be always truth
To Charlotte Cordays. Cæsar? Tyrant? No.
No man is tyrant who sees truth and rules
For truth’s sake. For the ruled must share the truth
Where Cæsars rule.
So much for her. She stands
Watchful and envious in the wings, and sees
Marat, not as we see him; not as Time
Will see Marat. L’Ami du Peuple to her
Is enemy of France, of Liberty.
This man most rare, most pure of soul, most clear
Of vision that the contest lies between
The rich and poor, has always lain between
The rich and poor, and not between the people
And kings; that poverty’s the thing, is seen
By Charlotte Corday from the wings, as nothing
But hatred, murder.
Well, my girl, you’ll get
Your picture in the galleries of history.
You’ll get it; and to choke you with your words: