Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met by William Wells Brown
page 64 of 215 (29%)
page 64 of 215 (29%)
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Chambre de Marat. He called out to the woman of the house to know if I
could be admitted, and the reply was, that the room was used as a sleeping apartment, and could not be seen. As this was private property, my blue card of membership to the Congress was not available. But after slipping a franc into the old lady's hand, I was informed that the room was now ready. We entered a court and ascended a flight of stairs, the entrance to which is on the right; then crossing to the left, we were shown into a moderate-sized room on the first floor, with two windows looking out upon a yard. Here it was where the "Friend of the People" (as he styled himself,) sat and wrote those articles that appeared daily in his journal, urging the people to "hang the rich upon lamp posts." The place where the bath stood, in which he was bathing at the time he was killed by Charlotte Corday, was pointed out to us; and even something representing an old stain of blood was shown as the place where he was laid when taken out of the bath. The window, behind whose curtains the heroine hid, after she had plunged the dagger into the heart of the man whom she thought was the cause of the shedding of so much blood by the guillotine, was pointed out with a seeming degree of pride by the old woman. With my Guide Book in hand, I again went forth to "hunt after new fancies." * * * * * After walking over the ground where the guillotine once stood, cutting off its hundred and fifty heads per day, and then visiting the place where some of the chief movers in that sanguinary revolution once lived, I felt little disposed to sleep, when the time for it had |
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