THE SKULL OF CHARLOTTE CORDAY

By Leslie Dick

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist... feet which dance by themselves... all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition. As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex. To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by certain lasciviousness - the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.

ONE: 1889

Controversy at the Universal Exposition in Paris, on the centenary of the Revolution, as rival craniologists examine the skull of Charlotte Corday, kindly loaned for exhibition by Prince Roland Bonaparte, great-nephew of Napoleon and noted anthropologist, botanist, and photographer.

Professor Cesare Lombroso, criminal anthropologist, insists (after a brief examination of the skull) that specific cranial anomalies are present, which confirm his theory of criminal types, or 'born criminals'. He subsequently uses three photographs of the skull of Charlotte Corday, in his book La Donna Delinquente, la Prostituta e la Donna Normale (turin, 1893, co-written with Guglielmo Ferrero, translated into English and published in 1895 as The Female Offender) to demonstrate that Corday, despite the pure passion and noble motive of her crime, was herself a born criminal, and therefore in some sense destined to murder:

Political criminals (female). - Not even the purest political crime, that which springs from passion, is exempt from the law which we have laid down. In the skull of Charlotte Corday herself, after a rapid inspection, I affirmed the presence of an extraordinary number of anomalies, and this opinion is confirmed not only by Topinard's very confused monograph, but still more by the photographs of the cranium which Prince R. Bonaparte presented to the writers.

The cranium is platycephalic, a peculiarity which is rarer in the woman than in the man. To be noted also is a most remarkable jugular apophisis with strongly arched brows concave below, and confluent with the median line and beyond it. All the sutures are open, as in a young man aged from 23 to 25, and simple, especially the coronary suture.

The cranial capacity is 1,360 c.c., while the average among French women is 1,337; the shape is slightly dolichocephalic (77.7); and in the horizontal direction the zygomatic arch is visible only on the left - a clear instance of asymmetry. The insertion of the sagittal process in the forntal bone is also asymmetrical, and there is a median occipital fossa. The crotaphitic lines are marked, as is also the top of the temples; the orbital cavaties are enormous, especially the right one, which is lower than the left, as is indeed the whole right side of the face.

On both sides are pteroid wormaian bones.

Measurements - Even anthropometry here proves the existence of virile characteristics. The orbital area is 133 mm.q., while the average among Parisian women is 126. The height of the orbit is 35 mm., as against 33 in the normal Parisian.

The cephalic index is 77.5; zygomatic index 92.7; the facial angle of Camper, 85 degrees; the nasal height, 50 (among Parisians 48); frontal breadth, 120 (among Parisian women 93.2).

'The skull of Charlotte Corday herself' - Charlotte Corday, the 'angel of assassination', the beautiful virgin who fearlessly killed Marat in his bath, and calmly faced the quillotine, certain of the righteousness of her act. Corday becomes the paradigm of Lombroso's theory of innate criminality, simply because in every other respect she was so pure, so devoid of criminal characteristics. According to Lombroso, atavism in the male reveals itself in criminality; by contrast, the atavistic female is drawn to prostitution. Corday's virility is thus confirmed by her virginity.

The 'criminal type', or born criminal, is central to Lombroso theory of anthropology. W. Douglas Morrison, Warden of H.M. Prison, Wandsworth, writes in his 1895 introduction to The Female Offender:

The habitual criminal is a product, according to Dr Lombroso, of pathological and atavistic anomalies; (s)he stands midway between the lunatic and the savage; and (s)he represents a special type of the human race.

Lombroso generalises with ease about the female criminal type:

In short, we may assert that if female born criminals are fewer in number than the males, they are often much more ferocious.

What is the explanation? We have seen that the normal woman is naturally less sensitive to pain than a man, and compassion is the offspring of sensitiveness. If one be wanting, so will the other be.

We also saw that women have many traits in common with children; that their moral sense is deficient; that they are revengeful, jealous, inclined to vengeances of a refined cruelty.

In ordinary cases these defects are neutralised by piety, maternity, want of passion, sexual coldness, by weakness and an enderdeveloed intelligence. But when a morbid activity of the psychical centres intensifies the bad qualities of women, and induces them to seek relief in evil deeds; when piety and maternal sentiments are wanting, and in their place are strong passions and intensely erotic tendencies, much muscular strength and a superior intelligence for the conception and execution of evil, it is clear that the innocous semi-criminal present in the normal woman must be transformed into a born criminal more terrible than any man.

In 1889, as part of the Universal Exposition at Paris, numerous scientific congesses were held, and it was possible to attend three or four at a time. That summer, simultaneously there took place the International Congress of Physiological Psychology, the International Congress of Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism (participants included Freud, Myers, James, and Lombroso), and the Second International Congress of Criminal Anthropology. Many years later, Lombroso referred to that summer in Paris as that grievous or wretched time ('dolorosa'), and this wretchedness was due, at least in part, to the violent arguments that took place between Lombroso and the French craniologists, notably Dr Paul Topinard, over the skull of Charlotte Corday. Lombroso recalled that the only truly happy moment of his stay in Paris was when he was permitted to examine the skull itself, which was entrusted to him by Prince Roland Bonaparte.

Lombroso was particularly thrilled to find, on the skull of Charlotte Corday, the median occipital fossa, upon which his theory of criminal atavism rested. Nineteen years before, in 1870, 'in un fredda e grigia mattina di dicembre' - 'on a cold, grey December morning', Lombrosa performed an autopsy on the skull of Villella, a thief, and discovered this cranial anomaly, which he believed realted directly to the skull formations of apes. Lombroso kept the skull of Villella in a glass case on his desk for the rest of his life, and in 1907, he wrote: 'Quel cranio fin da quel giorno divenne per me il totem, il feticcio dell'antropologia criminale.' - 'From that day on, this skull became for me the totem, the fetish of criminal anthropology.' It was the median occipital fossa that proved to be the bone of contention, so to speak, at the Second Congress.

Turning to L'Anthropologie, volume 1, 1890, we find, on the very first page of this first volume, the text referred to by Lombroso as 'Topinard's very confused monograph', entitled 'A propos du Crane de Charlotte Corday'. In this work, Topinard implicitly criticises Lombroso's techniques of measuring cranial anomalies, but more importantly, rejects Lombroso's interpretations of these measurements. Topinard insists there is no determining connection between the shape of the skull and the psychology or behaviour of the human being:

Our project is not to describe the skull as if it were that of a known person, the objective being to compare craniological characteristics with the moral characteristics attributed by history to this person. We only wish to take the opportunity for a study which could be carried out on any other skull, the object of which would be to place before the eyes of our readers a summary of the manner in which, in our view, given the actual state of the science, an isolated skull should be described, inspired by the methods and the very precise procedures of our illustrious and regretted teacher, Paul Broca.

Topinard goes on to emphasize the importance given by the school of Broca to averages, and therefore the relative insignificance of a single skull. On the other hand, he writes, with a very precious skull, it is correct to carefully photograph and measure it, so that our grandchildren can make use of this data later, when science has progressed further. Topinard's description of the skull itself is vivid:

The skull, before my eyes, is yellow like dirty ivory; it is shiny, smooth, as, in a word, those skulls that have been neither buried in the bosom of the earth, nor exposed to the open air, but which have been prepared by maceration [soaking], then carefully placed and kept for a long time in a drawer of a cupboard, sheltered from atmospheric vicissitudes.

Topinard goes on to emphasize that, above all, the skull is normal, symmetrical, 'without a trace of artificial or pathological deformation, without a trace of illness', etc. It is the skull of a woman, 23 to 25 years old (Corday was 24 when guillotined), and there follow twenty-four pages of close technical description, eschewing any overt moral or sociological commentary. In conclusion, Topinard clearly disagrees with Lombroso:

It is a beautiful skull, regular, harmonic, having all the delicacy and the soft, but correct curves of feminine skulls.

For Topinard, the crucial fact is that, quite apart from exhibiting the appropriate delicacy and softness of normal femininity, the skull is an average skull, typical of European females. Topinard admits there are a few minor asymmetries, but insists these are significant, merely 'individual variations' on the norm. Topinard's polemic quietly but insistently defends Charlotte Corday's reputation, denying the virility, pathological asymmetry, and abnormality attributed to her by Lombroso.

Ironically, on p.382 of the 1890 volume of L'Anthropologie, Topinard is obliged to insert a belated Errata to his essay on the skull of Charlotte Corday. He notes that it is a rare exception that a text so full of numbers should appear without wome errors of transcription of typography. He himself spotted one such error, and 'M. Lombroso' caught another. Nevertheless, he writes, these slight changes do not affect in any way the terms of his polemic. It is easy to imagine Lombroso's satisfaction upon discovering these slips.

Clearly, the disagreements between Lombroso and Topinard went deeper than techniques of measurement. Lombroso, a Jew, was against nationalism, militarism, and colonialism; a Dreyfusard, he wrote a book on anti-semitism in 1894, and was the very first socialist candidate elected to the town council of Turin in 1902. His research into pellagra, a skin disease that ravaged the peasant population, was controversial, but accurate, and he struggled for many years to have his findings recognised and acted upon. Nevertheless, Lombroso's primary scientific project of criminal anthropology depends on the sonstruction of a hierarchy based on genetic characteristics, and on theories of atavism and degeneracy. (In 1892, Max Nordau dedicated his extremely influecial and pernicious book on degeneracy to Lombroso.)

By contrast, Yopinard, reviewing an anonymous polemic that proposed the forcible deportation of all seven million black Americans to Africa, in order to avoid racial disharmony, writes:

The solution is original, but impossible to realise... Instead of indulging in such a utopia, wouldn't the anonymous author do better to say that if the black and white races do not mix in his country, this is due to the inveterate prejudice of the Americans, who create an intolerable situation for the blacks, pushing them into an isolation in which they can only see them [the whites] as the enemy, a class which humiliates them, abuses its intellectual advantages, and refuses them an equal chance in the struggle for existence.

There is only one significant fact in the state of things revealed by this book: this is that the blacks, in the United States, after twenty years of emancipation, remain pariahs... Here it is the question of the workers, the Jewish question, the Chinese question. The Negro question is of the same kind: anthropological notions of race have no bearing on it whatsoever.

Lombroso's scientific socialism would probably have come under the heading of what Gramsci later dismissed as 'Lorianismo', aft Loria, the political theorist whose most striking proposal was that everyone should have their own aeroplane, a utopian vision of Los Angeles freeway urbanism long before Los Angeles existed. After a lifetime spent fascinated by skulls of people of genius, political criminals, and anarchists, Lombroso became, in his later years, a fanatical spiritualist. His death, in 1909, was marked by obituaries on the front pages of daily newspapers in Russia, the United States, and Japan. The disposal of his corpse is noteworthy: Giorgio Colombo's recent book on the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin, founded by Lombroso, includes a large photograph of Lombroso's head, beautifully preserved in alcohol in a glass jar. Colombo explains:

Among the papers of the illustrious professor, his family found three different wills, made at three different times, with small variations of a familiar kind. But one disposition, constant in all three wills, clearly indicated an explicit desire on Cesare Lombroso, which his relatives must strictly observe. This required that his body be taken to the laboratory of forensic medicine, to undergo an autopsy by his collegue Professor Carrara - this was to reply, post mortem, to those who had accused him of only working on the bodies of the poor. His skull was to be measured and classified, and then mounted on the rest of his skeleton; his brain was to be analysed in the light of his theory of the relation between genius and madness. Whether Carrara carried this out is not known; today the skeleton hangs in a glass case in the museum, the brain in a glass jar at its feet. In another case nearby stand the receptacles containing the intestines and the face itself. What remained of the body was creamted, and the ashes are to be found in an urn in the cemetery, between the painter Antonio Fontanesi and the poet Arturo Graf.

The face of Cesare Lombroso in its jar, with his squashed and moustachioed features pressed against the glass, is a sight that, once seen, is not easily forgotten.

TWO: 1927

MaMarie Bonaparte, aka Her Royal Highness Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark, was the only child of Prince Roland Bonaparte, owner of the skull of Charlotte Corday. She was seven years old in 1889, and later vividly remembered the inauguration of the Eiffel Tower and the Universal Exposition. She remembered also the reception that was given by her father for Thomas Edison, a very large party that included among the guests a group of American Indians in war paint and feathers. A number of different nationalities appeared as ethnographic and anthropological displays at the Exposition, imported especially for the event, to be measured by the anthropologists, and photographed bt Prince Roland. The 'Peaux-Rouges', however, were represented in Paris by Buffalo Bill Cody's troupe of performers, Sioux Indians from Dakota, most of whom politely refused to allow the scientists to measure their heads and bodies. These were the quests at the Prince's reception, in honour of Edison as an American. Marie remembered asking her father for permission to attend the party, if only for a little while. He refused. She wrote to him: 'O Papa, cruel Papa! I am no an ardinary woman like Mimau and Gragra. I am the true daughter of your brain. I am interested in science as you are.'

In 1923, during the long hours spent at her beloved father's bedside, as he battled with terminal cancer, Marie Bonaparte discovered Freud, through reading his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, which had just been published in French. As a child, Marie was particularly vulnerable to her father's frequent absences, prohibitions, and general unavailability, because her mother had died only a few days after giving birth to her. In the year of his final illness, Prince Roland could no longer leave her, and they spent every day together, taking lunch and dinner by themselves. Her father finally died in April 1924, the same month Marie Bonaparte's pseudonymous article on the clitoris appeared in the journal Bruxelles Medical.

Marie Bonaparte was fascinated with the problem of female frigidity, a condition she herself suffered from, and her 1951 book De la Sexualite de la Femme (translated into English in 1953 as Female Sexuality) is reminiscent of Lombroso in its constant appeals to an ideal of normal femininity. In 1924, her article, 'Considerations on the Anatomical Causes of Frigidity in Women', argues that while certain types of frigidity are due to psychic inhibition, and are therefore susceptible to cure by psychotherapy, others can be attributed to too great a distance between the clitoris and the opening of the vagina. Having come up with this anatomical theory, Marie Bonaparte was delighted to discover Dr Halban of Vienna, a surgeon who had developed an operation which consisted in moving the clitoris closer to the urethra passage. In the 1924 article, signed A.E. Narjani, Marie Bonaparte wrote that five women had been operated on, with positive results. Later, she was forced to admit that the operation was not always one hundred per cent successful.

In December of 1924, after a long illness (salpingitis, or inflamation of the Fallopian tubes), which struck immediately after her father's funeral, and an operation to remove an ovarian cyst, which kept her in bed for three months, Marie Bonaparte (who had virtually unlimited wealth, inherited from her mother's family, the Blancs, who owned the casino at Monte Carlo) imported the plastic surgeon Sir Harold Delf Gillies from London, whom she had met through King George V the previous summer. Gillies performed two operations: first, to 'correct' her breasts, and then, to retouch a scar at the base of her nose, a scar she'd had surgically adjusted twice before. At this time, Marie Bonaparte was forty-two years old and sexually very active, having had a series of passionate love affairs since her marriage to Prince George of Greece and Denmark, who was a closet homosexual, in love with his uncle, Prince Waldemar.

On February 21, 1925, Marie Bonaparte invited Drs Rene Laforgue and Otto Rank to dinner, to discuss psychoanalysis. She received them in bed, still recuperating from her operations. In April, at Marie Bonaparte's request, Laforgue wrote to Freud, inquiring if he would accept her as a patient for psychoanalysis. In May, she was taking a cure in the south of France for persistent pains in the lower abdomen, pains she and Laforgue believed to have a psychological origin. (These pains seem to have been associated with her chronic pelvic inflammatory disease.) In June, Marie Bonaparte wrote directly to Freud for the first time. In September 1925, in Vienna, she began her analysis with Freud.

They got on like a horse on fire. Freud quickly acceded to her request for two hours of his time daily. He enjoyed the 'Prinzessin', and maliciously confided: 'Lou Andreas-Salome is a mirrir - she has neither your virility, nor your sincerity, nor your style.' It was not long before Marie Bonaparte decided to become a psychoanalyst, and gradually she became close friends with Ruth Mack Brunswick (who later became a junkie) and Anna Freud. Marie Bonaparte showed Freud her breast, and discussed his personal finances with him. She gave him a chow, and thereafter the aged Freud became a fervent dog lover. The dogs functioned as a kind of extended family across Europe: puppies were exchanged, dogs were mated, and their deaths lamented. In 1936, Freud wrote to Marie Bonaparte of the 'affection without ambivalence... that feeling of an intimate affinity, of an undisputed solidarity', which he felt for his chow, Jo-fi. And in 1938, together with Anna Freud, he translated Marie Bonaparte's book, Topsy, Chow-Chow au Poil d'Or - 'Topsy, the Chow with the Golden Hair'.

In July 1926, in Vienna, (after six months of analysis with Freud), Marie Bonaparte had her first consultation with Dr Halban. In the spring of 1927, she had Halban sever her clitoris from its position and move it closer to the opening of the vagina. She always referred to this operation by the name 'Narjani'. Yhe origins of this pseudonym are obscure. The operation, performed under local anaesthesia and in the presence of Ruth Mack Brunswick, took 22 minutes. Freud disapproved. It was 'the end of the honeymoon with analysis', In May Marie Bonaparte wrote to Freud that she was in despair over her stupidity. Freud, stern but forgiving, it seems, encouraged her to look after her seventeen year old daughter, Eugenie, who had been diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis. Marie Bonaparte felt Freud was repraoching her for her narcissism. In June 1927, the very first issue of the Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse, financed by Marie Bonaparte, came out, and in 1928 she began to practice as an analyst, with Freud himself giving postal supervision.

Marie Bonaparte's conduct of psychoanalysis was from the beginning almost as unorthodox as that of her great enemy, Jacques-Marie Lacan. She would send her chauffeur in a limousine to pick up her patients, to drive them to her palatial home in Saint-Cloud for their sessions. In fine weather, the hour was spent in the garden, with Marie Bonaparte stretched out on a chaise-longue behind the couch. She always crocheted as she listened, indoors or out. In later years, whenever possible, she would take her patients with her, as guests, to her houses in St Tropez or Athens thus inventing the psychoanalytic house party.

In April 1930, Marie Bonaparte visited Vienna, in order to consult Dr Halban again. The sensitivity in the original place from which the clitoris had been moved persisted. (During this period, Marie Bonaparte was involved in a long affair with Rudloph Loewenstein, who had been Lacan's analyst at one time, and also analysed her son, Peter.) Halban proposed further surgery on the clitoris, in combination with a total hysterectomy to finally eliminate her chronic salpingitis. Ruth Mack Brunswick was again present at the operation, which took place in May.

In February 1931, Marie Bonaparte had her clitoris operated on by Halban for the third and last time. Throughout this time, of course, Freud was suffering from cancer of the jaw, and undergoing regular operations. Her daughter's health was also very bad during this period, and Eugenie had to have an extremely painful operation on a tubercular cyst in her leg in May 1931.

From very early childhood, Marie Bonaparte was fascinated by murder. Servants' gossip vividly presented the probability that the impecunious and unfeeling Prince Roland, conspiring with his scheming mother, Princess Pierre, had, so to speak, hastened the end of the young heiress, Marie's mother. Marie Bonaparte's very first contribution to the nascent Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse was an essay on 'Le Cas de Madame Lefebvre', an upper middle class woman from the north of France, who had shot her pregnant daughter-in-law in cold blood, while out for a drive with the young couple. Marie Bonaparte's second psychoanalytic essay, published the same year, is entitled: 'Du Symbolisme des Trophees de Tete', or 'On the Symbolism of Heads as Trophies'. The essay investigates the question, why does the cuckolded husband traditionally wear horns, when otherwise horns are a symbol of virility and power, in both animals and gods. She argues that the relation between castration and decapitation is always played out in terms of the Oedipal drama, and the ridiculous figure of the betrayed husband reconstructs this drama in fantasy, where the laughing spectator unconsciously identifies with the lover, the unfaithful wife stands in for the mother, and the cuckold represents the father. His totemic horns ironically invoke his paternal potency, while the childish wish to castrate (or murder) the father, to turn this threat against him, is sublimated in laughter and derision.

Marie Bonaparte is perhaps most admired for her efficient arrangement of Freud's departure from Vienna in June 1938, after the German invasion of Austria in March of that year. She enlisted the help of the Greek diplomatic corps, and the King of Greece himself, in smuggling Freud's gold out of Austria. On the 5th of June, Freud and his family spent twelve hours in Paris, at Marie Bonaparte's house at Rue Adolphe Yvon, sitting in the garden and resting on the long journey from Vienna to London. Fredu had not set foot in his beloved Paris since 1889, the summer of the Universal Exposition celebrating the centenary of the Revolution. Marie Bonaparte was also personally responsible for saving Freud's letters to Fliess, a correspondence which Freud himself would have preferred to suppress.

In Female Sexuality (1951), Marie Bonaparte wrote at length about the practice of clitoridectomy in Africa, and about the operation that she here called 'the Halban-Narjani operation', in the last section of her book, 'Notes on Excision'. In this text, she once again presents her theories on frigidity in women. Total frigidity, she suggests, where both vagina and clitoris remain anaesthetic, is 'moral and psychogenic, and psychical causes [including psychoanalysis] may equally remove it. For this reason, she writes: 'The prognosis for total frigidity in women is generally favourable.' Not so the case of partial frigidity, in which the woman experiences clitorial pleasure, but no vaginal orgasm. Marie Bonaparte considers whether the cultural prohibition on infantile masturbation works in the same way as the practice of clitoridectomy, as an attempt to 'vaginalize' the woman, to internalize the erotogenic zone, and intensify vaginal sensitivity. She concludes that neither method succeeds in 'feminizing' or 'vaginalizing' the young girl, and sees such physical or psychical 'intimidation' as cruel and unproductive.

Earlier in Female Sexuality, Marie Bonaparte writes specifically about Halban's operation, referring once again to five cases, two of which could not be followed up, two showed 'generally favourable, though not decisive results', and one was unsuccessful. It is difficult to identify Marie Bonaparte herself among these five cases, although one cannot help suspecting the last. In this case, after the operation, the woman 'had only been fully satisfied twice in normal coitus, and then only while the cut, which became enfected, remained unhealed, thus temporarily mobilizing the essential feminine masochism. Once the cut healed, she had to revert to the sole form of coitus which had so far satisfied her: the kneeling position on the man lying flat.' Marie Bonaparte comments: 'This woman's masculinity complex was exceptionally strong.'

THREE: 1793

In July 1793, Charlotte Corday travelled alone to Paris from Caen, in Normandy, in order to assassinate Marat. Passionately attached to the cause of the Girondins, she firmly believed the death of Marat would restore order and bring peace to France. She intended to kill Marat on the Champ de Mars on July 14th, at the Fete de la Liberte, the fourth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. She later wrote that she had expected to be torn to pieces immediately by the people. She soon learned, however, that Marat was too ill either to take part in the festival or to attend the Convention. Corday was reduced to subterfuge in order to gain admittance to Marat's house.

On the 12th of July, Corday wrote her testament, a passionate justification of assassination, and pinned it with her baptismal certificate and laissez passer, inside her dress. Very early the next morning, she put on a brown dress and a tall black hat, in the typical fashion of Normandy, and carrying her gloves, fan, and handbag containing watch, keys, and money, she left her cheap hotel to but a kitchen knife. The heat was already intense.

At nine o'clock she took a cab to Marat's residence, No. 20, Rue des Cordeliers, where he lived in cramped quarters above the press of his jounal 'L 'Ami du Peuple'. The concierge asked Corday what she wanted, and she turned away without a word, walking quickly down the street. Corday returned at about half past eleven, managing to get past the concierge without being seen. She rang the bell, and Marat's partner, Simonne Evrard, and her sister, Catherine Evrard, together refused her entry. Marat was too ill to receive anyone.

Corday returned to the Hotel de la Providence, and wrote Marat a letter, telling him she wanted to see him in order to give him information about the Girondist plots in Caen. She posted this, and then sat down to wait for a reply. In the late afternoon, she wrote a second letter, again appealing to be allowed a short interview. She ended this letter with the words, 'Il suffit que je sois bien Malheureuse pour avoir Droit a votre bienveillance.' - 'My great unhappiness gives me the right to your kindness.' She posted this second letter, but Marat was dead before it was delivered.

Corday returned to the Rue des Cordeliers at about seven in the evening, hoping to arrive shortly after her second letter. She had spent the afternoon having her hair done; she sent for a hairdresser to come to the hotel, he curled and set her hair, and powdered it lightly. She also changed her outfit. Thinking of Judith of Bethulia, she surmised that Marat was more likely to grant her an audience if she was seductively dressed. She wore a loose spotted muslin dress with a fichu of delicate pink gauze. She tied green ribbons around her high black hat, and once again took a cab to Marat's house.

At the door, Corday argued, first with the concierge and then with Simonne Evrard, until Marat, in his bath, called out to his companion, who went in to him. He would see Charlotte Corday.

Marat was in a tiny room, between the passage and his bedchamber, that was lit by two windows onto the street. He was sitting in a shoe bath, naked, with an old dressing gown thrown across his shoulders. A slab of wood rested across the bath, to serve as a desk, and on this were placed paper, pen, and a bottle of ink tilted by a small bit of wood. His head was wrapped in a cloth soaked in vinegar.

He was near death, as a result of his illness, which were various; he suffered acutely from eczema, migraines, herpes, diabetes, arthritis, and neurasthenia. His gastric troubles required him to consume only liquids, and in order to sustain his furious writing practice, Marat drank a minimum of twenty cups of coffee a day. The sores and lesions that covered his body were a horrifying sight; people were often reluctant to sit next to him in the Convention. One expert described his disease as 'L 'affection squammeuse et vesiconte', a sort of generalised scaly eczema. His body deteriorated quickly after his death, although this was partly due to the extreme July heat.

Admitted to his closet, Charlotte Corday talked to Marat briefly about the Girondists at Caen, her fan in one hand and her knife in the other, and then stabbed him, plunging the knife straight downwards into his naked breast. Marat cried out, 'A moi, chere amie, a moi! Charlotte Corday was shocked to see Simonne Evrard's distress. There was a tremendous amount of blood, and he died almost immediately. Simonne Evrard and the cook dragged Marat's body out of his bath and tried to put him into bed. Charlotte Corday ventured into the corridor but the street porter drove her into the salon, where he hit her over the head with a chair. A dentist appeared, followed by a doctor and the commissioner of police for the 'section du Theatre Francais'. At eight o'clock Corday's second letter arrived; Guellard the police commissioner carefully wrote on it: 'This letter was not delivered... it was rendered useless by the admission of the assassin at half-past seven, at which hour she committed her crime.'

David's extraordinary painting, 'Marat Assassine' shows the Friend of the People dead in his bath, holding in his left hand the letter dated 13 July 1793, with the words clearly legible: 'Il suffit que je sois bien Malheureuse pour avoir Droit a votre bienveillance.' On the packing case next to the bath lies an assignat, or promissory note, with a covering letter from Marat, evidence of his generosity: 'Give this assignat to your mother'. The bloodstained knife lies on the floor; Marat's limp right arm hangs down, still grasping his quill pen. On the packing case itself, in Roman capitals the text: 'A MARAT. DAVID. L' AN II'. These various texts, in simultaneous juxtaposition within the painting, tell the whole story, David's version of the story. Marat's skin is flawless and very pale.

Historians argue over Charlotte Corday's beauty, the colour of her hair, and even what she was wearing when she committed the murder. After carefully weighing the different accounts, it seems she brought three outfits to Paris with her: the brown dress (before the murder), the spotted muslin (during), and a white dress (after), this last the dress she wore to her trial. To these outfits must be added the red chemise, which she wore to the guillotine, traditional execution dress for murderers, arsonists, and poisoners. On the subject of her hair, it seems to have been 'chestnut', and the tradition that holds her to have been 'blonde cendree', or ashe-blond, was misled simply by the light powder that the hairdresser Person applied the afternoon of the murder. As for her beauty, it is generally agreed that her chin was very large, a classic sign of degeneracy in Lombroso's theory, though by 1889 the skull was missing its lower jaw, so he never knew this. The only objective account of Charlotte Corday's physical appearance comes from the laissez passer, issued at Caen for her trip to Paris. She is described as: '24 years old, height five feet one inch (cinq pieds un pouce), hair and brow chestnut (chatains), eyes grey, forehead high, nose long, mouth medium, chin round, cleft (fourchu), face oval'. Her height is another area of uncertainty; often described as tall and striking, perhaps 'un pouce' means two to three inches. Or possibly her traditional Normande hat, with its tall conical crown, added to her stature.

Immediately after the murder, the revolutionary press depicted Corday as a monster: 'une femme brune, noire, grosse et froide' - 'malpropre, sans grace... la figure dure insolente, erysipelateuse et sanguine'. To the Gironde, needless to say, she was indescribably beautiful, an angel. Ironically, Corday's murder of Marat was a bloody turning point in the Revolution; it was arguably the event that precipitated the Terror. In 1836 Marat's sister, Albertine, declared: 'Had my brother lived, they would never have killed Danton, or Camille Desmoulins.' Michelet notes his belief that Marat would have 'saved' Danton, 'and then saved Robespierre too; from which it follows that there would have been no Thermidor, no sudden, murderous reaction'.

On the 16th of July, the funeral of Marat took place. In charge of the design, David passionately wanted to display the corpse of Marat arranged in his bath exactly as in his painting. Unfortunately, the corpse was in such state of corruption that, despite the caliant efforts of embalmers, this was not possible. The body was placed in a sarcophagus of purple porphyry taken from the collection of antiquities at the Louvre; a huge tricolour drapery, soaked in alcohol, was wrapped around the body; the alcohol was renewed at regular intervals, in the hope of retarding the bodily decay which, as David noted, was already far advanced.

A right arm was carefully placed, the hand holding a pen, to hang over the edge of the sarcophagus. The eyes and mouth of Marat were wide open, impossible to close, and the tongue, protruding in his death agony, had been cut out. The vast funeral procession began at the club of the Cordeliers, and wound through the streets of Paris, the chariot on which Marat's body was displayed being pulled by twelve men, while young girls in white, carrying cypress boughs, walked alongside. Thousands followed the cortege. As evening fell, torches were lit. At midnight, the procession returned to the garden of the Cordeliers. Speeches, revolutionary hymns, and elegies continued until two in the morning. One unfortunate enthusiast rushed forward to kiss the hand that held the pen, and the arm came off. One of David's special effects, the arm did not belong to Marat. Finally Marat was buried beneath a granite pyramid (designed by Martin), although the removal of his remains to the Pantheon was already planned. The funeral became a saturnalia that went on all night.

In prison, Charlotte Corday passed the 16th of July writing a long letter to Charles Barbaroux, the Girondin activist at Caen. In this letter she gave a complete account of her trip from Caen to Paris, the days of uncertainty at the hotel, the murder, and the aftermath. Her tone is elated: 'A lively imagination, a sensitive heart, promised me a stormy life; let those who regret me consider this and let them rejoice to think of me in the Elysian Fields with some other friends.' On the 15th she had asked for a painter to come to the prison and paint her portrait: 'Je vous en prie de m'envoyer un peintre en miniature.' Corday wrote to Barbaroux that she always intended to remain anonymous, expecting to be torn to pieces immediately after the murder. Yet she pinned her identity papers and her manifesto inside the bosom of her dress, and in prison she both requested a portrait painter and had a hat made - 'faite a Paris selon la mode du temps' - a white bonnet which she wore to the scaffold.

At the trial, on the 17th, an ex-pupil of David and captain of the National Guard, Hauer, made a drawing of Charlotte Corday. She moved her head to afford him a better view. When the guilty verdict came through at mid-day, Hauer accompanied Corday to her cell, in order to improve his drawing. As he worked, she made suggestions and posed for him, placing her hands folded on her breast.

The executioner Sanson appeared at about three o'clock. In his memoirs he recalled that when Corday saw him come in, holding a pair of scissors in one hand and the chemise rouge in the other, she inadvertently exclaimed, 'Quoi, deja!' - 'What, already!' However, she soon regained her equilibrium. As Sanson was cutting her hair, she took the scissors from him and cut off a long lock to give to Hauer.

Usually worn by men, the red chemise hung low on her breast. Corday refused the chair offered by Sanson, freferrin to stand in the tumbril, facing the insults and admiration of the crowd. Thousands turned out to see her go to the scaffold, in the Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la Concorde). It poured with rain for three quarters of an hour, as the cart moved slowly through the thronged streets, and the chemise rouge, soaked through, outlined her body, moulding her breasts. She paled slightly at the sight of the scaffold, but recovered by the time she got to the top of the steps. Sanson writes that he attempted to place himself in such a position as to block her view of the guillotine. Corday made a point of looking, commenting: 'In my position, one is naturally curious.'

She tried to address the people, but was given no time; her fichu was torn off her neck, and in a moment, it seemed, her head rolled on the ground. Immediately one of Sanson's assistants, a follower of Marat called Legros, ran his knife up the severed neck and held the head high to show it to the crowd, whereupon he gave it a slap, or possibly two or three slaps. The face was seen to blush - not only the cheek that was slapped, but both cheeks, exactly as if she were still able to feel emotion. The spectators were appalled; Michelet writes: 'a tremor of horror ran through the murmuring crowd'.

Much discussion ensued on the likelihood of sensation remaining after decapitation. Scientists entered into elaborate disputations on the force vitale, and on whether the head blushed from shame, grief, or indignation. Sanson wrote a letter to the newspaper, condemning the action; he considered it one of the most shameful moment of his career. Legros himself was thrown into jail.

Immediately after the execution, an autopsy was carried out on the body, principally to determine Charlotte Corday's virginity. At the trial she'd been asked how many children she had, and the revolutionary press claimed she was four months pregnant. Perhaps the heroic and virginal figure of Jeanne d'Arc was behind this compulsion to prove Corday promiscuous. In any case, David himself, as a member of the National Convention, attended the autopsy, believing or hoping that 'traces of libertinage' would be found. To his chagrin, her virginity was confirmed. There exists a vivid description of a drawing of this scene:

The body lies outstretched on a board, supported by two trestles. The head is placed near the trunk; the arms hang down to the ground; the cadaver is still dressed in a white robe, the upper part of which is bloody. One person, holding a torch in one hand and an instrument (some kind of speculum?) in the other, seems to be stripping Charlotte of her clothing. Four others are bending forward, examining the body attentively. At the head we find two individuals, one of whom wears the tircolour belt; the other extends his hands as if to say: "Here is the body, look."

Historians generally agree that Charlotte Corday's body was buried in Ditch No.5 in the cemetery at the Madeleine, Rue d'Anjou-Saint-Honore, between Ditch No.4, which held the corpse of Louis XVI, and No.6, which would soon receive the bodies of Phillipe Egalite and Marie Antoinette. Chateaubriand was responsible for exhuming the royal remains in 1815, and left a vivid account, in his Memoires d'outre-tombe, of how he recognised the skull of Marie Antoinette, from his recollection of the smile she gave him on one occasion at Versailles in early July 1789 just before the fall of the Bastille:

When she smiled, Marie Antoinette drew the shape of her mouth so well that the memory of that smile (frightful thought!) made it possible for me to recognise the jaw-bone of this daughter of kings, when the head of the unfortunate was uncovered in the exjumations of 1815.

It remains a mystery, however, precisely how the skull of Charlotte Corday came to be in the collection of Prince Roland Bonaparte. Dr. Cabanes, celebrated collector of historical gossip and author of such valuable works as Le Cabinet Secret de l'Histoire (1905), Les Indescretions de l'Histoire (1903), and Les Morts mysterieuses de l'Histoire (1901), carried out extensive and thorough research on the provenance of this skull. He learned from Prince Roland that he had acquired it from M. George Duruy, 'who said he would not be sorry to get rid of thins anatomical item because it terrified Mme. Durury'. Durury himself told Cabanes he'd discovered the skull at his aunt's, Mme. Rousselin de Saint-Albin; a wardrobe door was standing slightly open, and Durury spotted the skull sitting on a shelf inside. Mme. de Saint-Albin told him it had belonged to her late husband, who was himself convinced it was the skull of Charlotte Corday. Indeed, Rousselin de Saint-Albin had gone so far as to write 'a sort of philosophical dialogue' between himself and the skull, in which they discuss her mitives for the crime. Saint-Albin claimed to have bought the skull from an antiquary on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, who had himself bought it in a sale. Cabanes speculates on the likelihood of the sale in question being that of the 'celebre amateur', Denon, which took place in 1826, but notes that the catalogue of this sale does not mention a skull.

Durury himself believed that Saint-Albin was in a position to take possession of the skull immediately after the execution, since Saint-Albin was Danton's secretary, and therefore could have obtained the necessary authorisation. Cabanes returns to the evidence of the anthropologists who examined the skull at the Universal Exposition of 1889, Benedikt, Lombroso, and Topinard, who agreed that the skull 'had been neither buried in the earth, nor exposed to the air'. Was the skull dug up immediately, or was it perhaps sold by the executioner, Sanson? Cabanes suggests that the story that is always denied most vehemently is likely to be the true account: that after the autopsy, 'la tete aurait ete preparee par quelque medecin et conservee comme piece curieuse' - 'the head was treated by some doctor and preserved as a curiosity'.

Finally, Cabanes includes, as an appendix to his investigation, a long letter from M. Lenotre, 'the very knowledgable historian of 'Paris revolutionnaire', to his friend G. Montorgueil, which was written in the full awareness that the letter would be passed on to Dr. Cabanes. In this letter, Lenotre ventures his opinion that the skull is authentic. He argues that there was a thriving trade in body parts and hair of the victims of the guillotine, and points to the later wealth of the Sanson family as evidence that Sanson was 'in a good position to render certain services, to make deals, to traffic a little in the guillotine'. Lenotre goes on to recount an anecdote of the period:

If (Sanson) didn't sell heads, who did? For there's no question they were sold! One evening in 1793, a woman fainted in the Rue Saint-Florentin; she fell; a package she was carrying in her apron rolled into the gutter: it was a head, freshly decapitated.... She was on her way from the cemetery at the Madeleine, where a grave-digger had supplied her with this horrible debris.

Lenotre's most striking contribution to the discussion, however, is a description of a dinner party chez Rousselin de Saint-Albin:

One evening, during the reign of Louis Philippe, Saint-Albin invited to dinner a group of friends who were curious about the history of the Revolution. He promised them a sensational surprise. At dessert, a large glass jar was brought in, and removed from its linen case. This was the surprise, and how sensational it was, you can judge, for the glass jar contained the head of Charlotte Corday. Not the skull merely, you understand, but the head, conserved in alcohol, with her half-closed eyes, her flesh, her hair.... The head had been in this condition since 1793; lately Saint-Albin had decided to have it prepared - excuse these macabre details - and wanted, before this operation, to allow his friends the spectacle of this thrilling relic.

Once a head, preserved in alcohol; then a skull, to hold in one's hands, to measure. Now all that remains of Charlotte Corday, the last vestiges of the 'thrilling relic', are three photographs of the skull itself. And yet, how evocative these photographs seem, how poetic, these emblems of castration, perhaps, memento mori of the Revelution, these shadowy traces of secret exhumation.

He (Freud) was indignant about the story of the sale (of the Fliess correspondence to Marie Bonaparte) and characteristically gave his advice in the form of a Jewish anecdote. It was the one about how to cook a peacock. "You first bury it in the earth for a week and then dig it up again." "And then?" "Then you throw it away!"