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So scrupulous was Marat in money matters that he would accept no help from the Government. He neither drew a salary nor would he allow any but private citizens to help issue his paper. He lived in absolute poverty with his beloved wife, Simonne Evrard.

They had met about Seventeen Hundred Eighty-eight, and between them had grown up a very firm and tender bond. He was twenty years older than she, but Danton said of her, “She has the mind of a man.”

Simonne had some property and was descended from a family of note. When she became the wife of Marat, her kinsmen denounced her, refused to mention her name, but she was loyal to the man she loved.

The Psalmist speaks of something “that passeth the love of woman,” but the Psalmist was wrong–nothing does.

Simonne Evrard gave her good name, her family position, her money, her life–her soul into the keeping of Jean Paul Marat. That his love and gratitude to her was great and profound, there is abundant proof. She was his only servant, his secretary, his comrade, his friend, his wife. Not only did she attend him in sickness, but in banishment and disgrace she never faltered. She even set the type, and at times her arm pulled the lever of the press that printed the daily message.

Let it stand to the eternal discredit of Thomas Carlyle that he contemptuously disposes of Simonne Evrard, who represents undying love and unflinching loyalty, by calling her a “washerwoman.” Carlyle, with a savage strain of Scotch Calvinism in his cold blood, never knew the sacredness of the love of man and woman–to him sex was a mistake on the part of God. Even for the sainted Mary of Galilee he has only a grim and patronizing smile, removing his clay pipe long enough to say to Milburn, the blind Preacher, “Oh, yes; a country lass elevated by Catholics into a wooden image and worshiped as a deity!”

Carlyle never held in his arms a child of his own and saw the light of love reflected in a baby’s eyes; and nowhere in his forty-odd volumes does he recognize the truth that love, art and religion are one. And this limitation gives Taine excuse for saying, “He writes splendidly, but it is neither truth nor poetry.”

When Charlotte Corday, that poor, deluded rustic, reached the rooms of Marat, under a friendly pretense, and thrust her murderous dagger to the sick man’s heart, his last breath was a cry freighted with love, “A moi, chere amie!”

And death-choked, that proud head drooped, and Simonne, seeing the terrible deed was done, blocked the way and held the murderess at bay until help arrived.

Hardly had Marat’s tired body been laid to rest in the Pantheon, before Charlotte Corday’s spirit had gone across the Border to meet his–gone to her death by the guillotine that was so soon to embrace both Danton and Robespierre, the men who had inaugurated and popularized it.

All Paris went into mourning for Marat–the public buildings were draped with black, and his portrait was displayed in the Pantheon with the great ones gone. A pension for life was bestowed upon his widow, and lavish resolutions of gratitude were laid at her feet in loving token of what she had done in upholding the hands of this strong man.

But Paris, the fickle, in two short years repudiated the pension, the portrait of Marat was removed from the Pantheon, and his body taken by night to another resting-place.

Simonne the widow, and Albertine the sister, sisters now in sorrow, uniting in a mutual love for the dead, lived but in memory of him.

But Carlyle was right–this was a “washerwoman.” She spent all of her patrimony in aiding her husband to publish and distribute his writings, and after his death, when friends proved false and even the obdurate kinsmen still considered her name pollution, she took in washing to earn money that she might defend the memory of the man she loved.

She was a washerwoman.

I uncover in her presence, and stand with bowed head in admiration of the woman who gave her life for liberty and love, and who chose a life of honest toil rather than accept charity or all that selfishness and soft luxury had to offer. She was a washerwoman, but she was more–she was a Woman.

Let Carlyle have the credit of using the word “washerwoman” as a term of contempt, as though to do laundry-work were not quite as necessary as to produce literature.

The sister and the widow wrote his life, republished very much that he had written, and lived but to keep alive the name and fame of Jean Paul Marat, whose sole crime seemed to be that he was a sincere and honest man, and was, throughout his life–often unwisely–the People’s Friend.