Booth's Mental health

[Juan Marrero]

Bill, I think your input is wonderful because otherwise we would risk becoming a church choir with any number of "Hosannahs" issuing daily.

Come to think of it (but not in anyway implying that there is any sympathy for JWB's actions on this Forum), there is one assassin I happen to like very much. As you probably know, during the Terror of the French Revolution, Charlotte Corday, a very young (19 or so if I recall) Norman woman, killed Marat, the Swiss-born, publisher-agitator.

Charlotte was intially an enthusiast of France's republican revolution. However Robespierre lost her to the cause when he decided that the best way to change minds was to cut off heads. Robespierre's work was aided by the helpful lists compiled and published daily by Marat suggesting suitable subjects for immediate decapitation. The effects of this policy began to be seen in Charlotte's native Normandy. Charlotte then decided that she would do what a young girl had to do, after all Joan of Arc would have done no less.

Properly brought up, Charlotte wrote a letter of apology to her father asking forgiveness for leaving for Paris without his permission. Once in Paris, she went straight to Marat's house, telling the doorkeeper that she had a list of anti-revolutionary suspects for Marat's consideration. The housekeeper wanted to send her off, but Marat had overheard from his bath where he was soaking for a painful chronic skin condition the sound of a young woman's voice. Intrigued, he ordered that she be brought into his sanctum. Instead of a list, Charlotte had a knife which she expertly used.

Done with her work, she sat down to await her own arrest. She explained later that she did not want anyone else to be charged with what she had done alone. The artist David went on to depict Marat dead in his bath in an hagiographic piece of propaganda that helped turn Marat, for a while, as the Revolution's martyr of liberty.

As for Charlotte, she was guillotined several days later, stoic and uncomplaining as ever. I will not speculate on her mental health status!

I posit that JWB was no Charlotte Corday because AL was no Marat.