In July 1793, Jean-Paul Marat sat in a shoe-shaped medicinal bathtub correcting proofs for his newspaper when Charlotte Corday talked her way past his guards and stabbed him in the chest. This episode examines the radical Montagnard leader who ran a revolutionary command center from his bath, the Girondin sympathizer who blamed him for the September massacres and calmly waited to be arrested, and the blood-stained proof sheet and letter that survive from the crime scene.

The larger story is what happened next. Jacques-Louis David, France's leading neoclassical painter and a political extremist who voted to execute the king and sat on the Committee of General Security, was tasked with turning Marat into a martyr. We break down how The Death of Marat replaced the real newspaper proof with a fabricated letter, borrowed lighting from Caravaggio ...