Rescued by Marat

Hilary Mantel

  • Théroigne de Méricourt: A Melancholic Woman during the French Revolution by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Martin Thom
    Verso, 284 pp, £34.95, July 1991, ISBN 0 86091 324 4
  • Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution by Olwen Hufton
    Toronto, 201 pp, £23.00, May 1992, ISBN 0 8020 6837 5

In 1817, at the asylum of La Salpêtrière in Paris, a long-term inhabitant died of pneumonia. Her malnourished, oedematous body was taken away for autopsy. For some years before her death she had been intractably and violently psychotic. She had crawled on the floor like an animal, eaten straw. She stripped off her clothes in freezing weather, and did not mind (her keepers noted) if men saw her naked. She threw icy water on her bedding and her person, and on the floor of her cell.

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