At Caen nobody had any idea of her plan. She had told her aunt she would go to Argentan and thence to England. She had always concealed her political views so carefully that nobody could have suspected her.
She arrived at Paris on the forenoon of the eleventh of July, and put up at the Providence Hotel. Tired out by the long and tedious journey, she went to bed early in the afternoon and slept well till the next morning. No conscientious scruples disturbed her. Her mind was fully made up, and she did not for a minute hesitate to execute her project. The next morning she went to the Palais Royal, purchased a strong and sharp steel knife, and carefully hid it in her bosom. She then asked herself when and where she was to use her weapon. She would have preferred to give her act a certain solemnity. At Caen, while brooding over her purpose, she had conceived the plan to assassinate Marat on the Champ de Mars, on the fourteenth of July, during the celebration of the anniversary of the destruction of the Bastile and the overthrow of the monarchy. She hoped to slay this king of anarchy, surrounded as he would then be by thousands of his murderous followers; but when the celebration was postponed, she planned to assassinate him at one of the sessions of the Convention, the scene of his crimes and proscriptions. When she learned that Marat was ill and did not attend the sessions of the Convention, there seemed no way left for her except to go to his residence and meet him there. She addressed a letter to him asking for a private interview. The letter remained unanswered. She sent a second letter, more urgent than the first, in which she requested an immediate interview for the purpose of communicating to him a secret of great importance. Moreover she represented herself as unhappy, as a victim of political persecution and appealed to his protection. After this appeal she hoped to be admitted.
At about seven o’clock in the evening of July 13 she left her hotel, took a cab and proceeded to the residence of Marat, a dismal old building, No. 20 in the Rue des Cordeliers. There Marat lived, and there also he had the office and the press and composing-rooms of his newspaper, “The Friend of the People.” Marat’s living apartments, which were furnished with a certain elegance strangely contrasting with the general appearance of the building, were situated on the second floor and were shared by his mistress, or rather his wife, who loved him passionately, and who watched over him with the fidelity of a dog. Knowing the great peril to which the idol of her heart might be exposed from foreign visitors, she subjected each of them, before admitting him, to a careful scrutiny and painstaking examination.