In a mean, brick-paved, ill-lighted, and almost unfurnished room
of that house in the Rue de l'Ecole de Medecine, the People's
Friend is seated in a bath. It is no instinct of cleanliness he
is obeying, for in all France there is no man more filthy in his
person and his habits than this triumvir. His bath is medicated.
The horrible, loathsome disease that corrodes his flesh demands
these long immersions to quiet the gnawing pains which distract
his active, restless mind. In these baths he can benumb the
torment of the body with which he is encumbered.

For Marat is an intellect, and nothing more--leastways, nothing
more that matters. What else there is to him of trunk and limbs
and organs he has neglected until it has all fallen into decay.
His very lack of personal cleanliness, the squalor in which he
lives, the insufficient sleep which he allows himself, his habit
of careless feeding at irregular intervals, all have their source
in his contempt for the physical part of him. This talented man
of varied attainments, accomplished linguist, skilled physician,
able naturalist and profound psychologist, lives in his intellect
alone, impatient of all physical interruptions. If he consents to
these immersions, if he spends whole days seated in this
medicated bath, it is solely because it quenches or cools the
fires that are devouring him, and thus permits him to bend his
mind to the work that ishis life. But his long-suffering body is
avenging upon the mind the neglect to which it has been
submitted. The morbid condition of the former is being
communicated to the latter, whence results that disconcerting
admixture of cold, cynical cruelty and exalted sensibility which
marked his nature in the closing years of his life.