Marat, Jean Paul, a fanatical democrat, born in Neuchâtel, his father an Italian, his mother a Genevese; studied and practised medicine, came to Paris as horse-leech to Count d'Artois; became infected with the revolutionary fever, and had one fixed idea: “Give me,” he said, “two hundred Naples bravoes, armed each with a good dirk, and a muff on his left arm by way of shield, and with them I will traverse France and accomplish the Revolution,” that is, by wholesale massacre of the aristocrats; he had more than once to flee for his life, and one time found shelter in the sewers of Paris, contracting thereby a loathsome skin disease; he was assassinated one evening as he sat in his bath by Charlotte Corday (q.v.), but his body was buried with honours in the Pantheon by a patriot people, “that of Mirabeau flung out to make room for him,” to be some few months after himself cast out with execration (1743‒1793).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Marañon * Marathon