In the streets, carefully dressed as a peasant woman wearing a waistcoat, with kerchiefs on her head and round her throat, a disguise she rather enjoyed, she marvelled at the docility of the Bordelais, standing in endless queues for inferior food, doing nothing to protest when the cooks of those in power pushed their way to the front to collect freshly baked white rolls and choice cuts of meat for their masters’ tables. There was something about the perilousness of their situation that seemed to galvanise her, and she would later speak of these months in hiding as times when it was still possible to laugh. Lucie herself was in a fortunate position. A local farmer’s wife from Le Bouilh, devoted to the family, brought provisions in the baskets strapped on to her donkey when she came twice a week to sell potatoes and cabbages in the nearby market. Frédéric kept in touch by sending letters concealed in a loaf of bread, brought to Bordeaux each week by a young boy. Le Bouilh had been sequestered but before it had been sealed shut, the caretaker had managed to remove all the best linen and small objects, and these she sent, a few at a time, by trusted courier to Bordeaux, along with a supply of logs for firewood.
Jeanne-Marie-Ignace-Thérésia Cabarrus was regarded by many as the most beautiful woman of the revolution. She was small, not much over 5 feet, but she had silky black hair, very white skin, a slightly turned-up nose, perfect teeth and a ravishing smile. Even Gouverneur Morris, never lavish with his praise, remarked approvingly on her sprightliness. Born in July 1773 to a French merchant father and a Spanish mother, she had arrived in France at the age of 5 to be educated by the nuns. Added to her many other charms was that of her voice, which retained a barely perceptible foreign lilt. When only 14 she made a good marriage to the Marquis de Fontenay, a councillor at the Paris parliament; the following year, not yet 16, she gave birth to a son, Théodore. Lucie, who was three years older than Thérésia, had been introduced to her when they were both girls. ‘Nothing,’ she wrote later ‘could dim the radiance of her wonderfully fair skin.’
It was in the studio of the fashionable portrait painter Mme Vigée-Lebrun that Thérésia met Jean-Lambert Tallien, the son of a modest maître d’hôtel in an aristocratic household. Tallien was tall, with curly fair hair and regular, pleasant features, and he was then working for the printer Pancoucke. By their second meeting, not long afterwards, he had become secretary to Alexandre de Lameth and was moving rapidly up the political ladder. By then Thérésia too was causing a stir, both for her looks and for her salon, frequented by Lafayette and La Rochefoucault. With the revolution, Tallien found his true vocation. Though not as brutal as Danton, nor as outrageous as Marat, nor as cold as Robespierre, he shared most of their ideals. By the summer of 1792, he was clerk of the court to the Paris Commune, with the job of signing warrants for arrest.
At 25 one of the youngest deputies elected to the Convention, sitting on the Mountain with Robespierre, Tallien was sent, in the spring of 1793, to Tours to speed up recruitment for the army and to set up committees of security and surveillance. The city was in chaos: Tallien proved competent and not overly cruel. When représentants en mission were needed for rebellious Bordeaux, he seemed an obvious choice. In the special représentant uniform of long, tight-fitting blue redingote, tricolour sash, plumed hat, cross-belt and sabre, he cut a glamorous figure as he rode into the city behind General Brume.
The summer of 1793 was extremely hot, and Tallien took a few days’ holiday in the Pyrenees. Here he again met Thérésia, on vacation with her brothers and uncle from their house in Bordeaux, where she had taken refuge from the violence in Paris. She was divorced–she had been one of the first to take advantage of the new laws–and after falling out with her uncle she moved into a large apartment in the Cour Franklin where she filled her study with musical instruments, books, an easel and paints, and planted her terrace with orange trees. At the end of November, Thérésia was arrested and taken to the Fort du Hâ, a grim, humid 15th-century fortress; Tallien was able to have her freed. After this, the two were inseparable, and though Thérésia kept her rooms, in which lived Théodore and her maid Frenelle, she spent much of her time in the sumptuous apartments of the représentants en mission in the former Grand Séminaire, enjoying their unrationed food and the excellent wine confiscated from unhappy Bordeaux merchants. Though by the middle of the winter of 1793 Bordeaux was a ghost city, many of its inhabitants reduced to penury and malnutrition, those in power lived well.
And there were also occasions of jollity, even if of a forced nature. Virtue and terror, Robespierre maintained, were both aspects of the self-improvement and moral regeneration he believed should govern every part of life, both private and public. The festivals marking the revolutionary calendar were growing ever more theatrically absurd and opulent, with specially commissioned revolutionary oratorios, regiments of choristers, triumphal arches and the releasing of hundreds of white doves. For the Fête de la Raison on 10 December, a cortège of Bordeaux dignitaries, followed by 40 women feeding their babies, 100 girls dressed in white, soldiers, schoolchildren and the members of Jacobin clubs, processed slowly through the centre of the city. Behind followed mummers, grotesque figures parodying the Church and the nobility, a dwarf sitting on a donkey and shouting benedictions, criminals and prostitutes decked out in church vestments, later burnt, along with books of ‘chicanery and superstition’ in a gigantic auto-da-fe in the Place de la Comédie. Soon after, encouraged by Tallien, Thérésia gave a rousing speech on education, for which she wore an ‘amazon’s’ dress of bright blue cashmere, with yellow buttons and red velvet facings, her hair cut à la Titus under a fur-edged scarlet bonnet. Thérésia did not always take the revolution very seriously. From her hiding place, Lucie followed her exploits.
Whether because of the great prosperity of Bordeaux, or because Lacombe and Bertrand were exceptionally venal, Bordeaux’s Terror had been from the start as much about money as about survival. The revolutionary committees were more than happy to cut deals, accepting fortunes in exchange for acquittals. The Hôtel de Ville was already filled with works of art plundered from Bordelais churches and the nobility. ‘Tallien,’ the historian Michelet would write later, ‘sold lives, while his mistress served behind the counter.’ Tallien and Thérésia were soon tainted by charges of extortion and greed, and stories would later circulate about Thérésia’s great fondness for certain kinds of jewellery. On returning to Paris after the revolution, the Marquise de Lage de Volude would recount a particularly damning incident.
Mme de Lage de Volude had been a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. She was in Bordeaux, nursing her dying mother, when she heard of the September massacres. Rather than return to Paris, she had gone into hiding in Bordeaux. One day, a friend of hers who had been to call on Thérésia returned saying that she had spotted a pile of unsigned passports on Thérésia’s desk. Learning that Thérésia had a particular fondness for antique cameos, Mme de Lage de Volude bought an exceptionally fine piece and had it mounted with some diamonds that she still had left. She secured an introduction to Thérésia and told her that she desperately wanted to join her husband, who had managed to escape to America. Before leaving, she presented her cameo. A few days later, a passport arrived; Mme de Lage de Volude was able to leave France.
But there was another side to Thérésia. She had a generous heart and she was determined to save as many people as she could from the guillotine, whether they paid her or not. The Comte de Paroy, whom she counselled and protected, was only one of many who later stated that they had remained alive only through her help. By early 1794, it was widely reported that she was having a softening influence on her lover Tallien; and that she was not afraid.
The Terror, early in 1794, was reaching a peak in Bordeaux, ci-devant nobles, priests, peasants, merchants following one another rapidly to the guillotine in the Place Nationale, where people were beginning to complain of the persistent smell of blood, despite constant washing of the scaffold. On the lists of the accused in the Gironde were some of the charges that sent t
hem to their deaths: ‘suspicious opinions’, ‘nostalgia for the ancien régime’, ‘weak nature, concerned only with the abolition of the monasteries’, or simply ‘consorting with the nobility’. As in Paris, a few young women won reprieves by stating that they were pregnant, but once they had given birth they went to the scaffold. From her hidden room, Lucie listened in terror to the roll of drums before each beheading, and the crash of the blade that followed. ‘I could count,’ she wrote later, ‘the victims before seeing their names in the evening papers.’ When arrests of English and American merchants and their staff began, Lucie, light-skinned and fair-haired, feared for her own life each time she left the house.
Frédéric’s own position was also becoming ever more precarious. When Potier, in whose house he was still hiding, came one day to Bordeaux to buy iron for his foundry, he happened to pass through the Place Nationale as a woman mounted the scaffold. Enquiring as to her crime, Potier learnt that she was a ‘ci-devant noble’; and this he found reasonable. But when the next to climb the steps was a peasant, whose crime was that of sheltering a nobleman, the full horror of his own position hit him. ‘In that poor man’s fate,’ wrote Lucie, ‘he saw his own.’ He hastened back to Mirabeau and told Frédéric that he was to leave instantly.
For a while, Frédéric was able to hide in his father’s house, Tesson, with the faithful Grégoire and his wife, but this came to an end when the local municipality sent men to draw up an inventory of the house’s valuable contents. Grégoire found him temporary shelter with the sister of another trusted groom. When her nerve went, Frédéric returned to Tesson, where, each day, there were rumours that the municipality would soon be taking over the château for its own use. Though barely recognisable in his rough peasant clothes, Frédéric was too well known locally to believe that he could survive for very long without hiding.
Lucie, listening to the talk around Bordeaux, was well aware of Thérésia’s relationship with Tallien. Sensing that the time was fast running out for her family, she decided to take a bold and terrifying step. She sent a letter to Thérésia. Without giving her name, she wrote: ‘A woman, who met Mme de Fontenay in Paris and knows that she is as good as she is beautiful, asks her to accord a moment’s interview.’ A friendly reply came back, with an invitation to call. ‘In a state of agitation difficult to convey’, Lucie went to Thérésia’s apartment, where she was greeted with great affection. Lucie told her that she wished to have the order of sequestration on Le Bouilh lifted, in order that she and her family could live there quietly. The only way to achieve this, said Thérésia, was for her to ask Tallien in person.
That evening, accompanied by the equally nervous de Chambeau, Lucie went to see Tallien, listening in terror to his approaching carriage, unmistakable in the silence of Bordeaux’s dark and shuttered streets. When Thérésia announced that Tallien was ready to receive her, Lucie was unable to move her feet forwards until Thérésia gave her a little push. Tallien, she was sure, would be her ‘executioner’. The meeting did not go well. As soon as Tallien realised that Lucie was the daughter of General Dillon and the daughter-in-law of the man who had addressed the ‘widow Capet’ as ‘Your Majesty’, he made a gesture with his hand indicating beheading, saying: ‘All the enemies of the Republic will have to go.’ Even in extreme adversity, Lucie was never undignified. ‘I have not come here, citizen,’ she replied, ‘to hear the death warrant of my relatives…I will not importune you further.’ Walking home, she reflected that if Tallien would not protect them, then ‘death seemed inevitable’.
The net, bit by bit, was drawing tighter. Sweeps, sudden descents by the revolutionary soldiers on houses at unexpected times, were gathering in people ever closer to Lucie. She now left the house only under the cover of darkness. M. de Chambeau, picked up while dining with friends, was taken off to the Fort du Hâ, where he spent a terrible 28 days, believing that each day was his last, before finding himself mysteriously released, the tribunal apparently ignorant of his aristocratic connections. Opposite the Fort du Hâ lived a teacher called Saint-Sernon and his daughter, who wrote the names of those arrested and sent to the guillotine on a blackboard and held it up for the prisoners to read from their barred windows. There was a community of men and women in hiding all over the city, seizing moments of gaiety, meeting fleetingly to talk, play cards and exchange food and news, but it was shrinking all the time. Every day now, there would be friends among those going to the guillotine, people who had been certain that they would never be touched. A young royalist, M. de Morin, to whom Lucie had fed omelettes made from eggs smuggled to her from Le Bouilh and truffles stolen by her cook from the stores of the représentants en mission, and who changed his hiding place every night, was picked up along with others in the small monarchist association they had formed and taken straight to the guillotine.
Then, one day, Lucie herself was recognised. She had discovered that unless she had a certificate to prove ownership of her house in Paris and her state bonds, she would lose them all. Taking Bonie, her Jacobin protector, with her, she went to the municipality, in which sat a dozen clerks, all wearing, to her ‘extreme distaste’, red bonnets. Bonie urged them to hurry, saying that his young friend was nursing a baby and could not be kept waiting. To Lucie’s horror, when her case was heard, the officer in charge insisted on reading out loud every line of the certificate. When he came to the word Dillon, one of the clerks looked up and asked her whether she was by any chance a sister or niece of ‘all those émigrés of that name who are on our list’? She was about to confess that she was, when a man who happened to be in the room interrupted, insisting loudly that she belonged to quite another family. As she left with her certificate, he whispered in her ear that he had known her great-uncle, the Archbishop.
Ever more desperately, Lucie was trying to think up ways to escape. For a while, she wondered whether she might not pass herself off as her Italian singing master’s daughter, taking her children back to Italy, with Frédéric disguised as her servant. As her agitation and fears for Frédéric and the children grew, so Lucie’s milk began to dry up.
M. de Brouquens was still under house arrest, but from time to time Lucie was able to pay him a visit. One day, she happened to be standing by his table when her eye fell on an item in the morning paper. A ship, the Diana of Boston, was to leave Bordeaux in eight days’ time. It was indeed news. For the whole of the past year, 80 American ships had been anchored in the Garonne, trapped there by France’s state of war with its neighbours. As Lucie hurried from the room, M. de Brouquens asked where she was going. ‘I am going to America,’ she replied.
Now that she had a plan in mind, Lucie’s sense of anguish and uncertainty seemed to leave her. She was still only 24, but it was she rather than Frédéric who was emerging as the more resolute and forceful of the two. Rarely buffeted by self-doubt or tormented, as he was, by the greyer shades of meaning, it was as if her solitary and loveless childhood had equipped her for such a challenge. She now had just eight days in which to have Frédéric fetched back from Tesson and kept hidden and safe, and to obtain passports and visas for them all, while keeping everything secret from the spying nurse. Marguerite, unable to shake off the malaria which had kept her shivering and feverish for many months, would stay behind, Lucie fearing that the long sea journey might prove fatal to her. Nor would Zamore accompany them. The question as to who could be trusted to go for Frédéric was solved by Bonie, who insisted that he would go himself. Thérésia, whom Lucie asked for help in securing the passports, pressed her to hurry, for Tallien had been denounced for ‘excessive moderation’ towards the Bordelais, and was likely to be recalled to Paris at any moment. He was to be replaced by an austere and pitiless 18-year-old called Marc-Antoine Jullien, who was known as the ‘shadow of Robespierre’.
All seemed to be going well when Lucie, accompanying de Brouquens–who had unexpectedly been released from house arrest–to Canoles, encountered Tallien on his way to visit the Swedish Consul on the outskirts of
the city. With all the grace and courtesy of a noble of the ancien régime, Tallien accepted her story that she and her family needed to visit Martinique, where she had financial matters to attend to, and promised to have papers prepared for her. ‘I can today,’ he told her, ‘make amends for the wrongs I have done you.’ Two hours later, his secretary Alexander brought her the documents requesting the municipality of Bordeaux to issue passports in the name of Citizen Latour and his family. (Thérésia told her that she had threatened never to see Tallien again unless he produced them.)
The first hurdle had been crossed. Next day Bonie set off to find Frédéric, taking with him a spare set of identity papers, borrowed from an unsuspecting friend, telling everyone that he was going in search of grain, more plentiful in the Charente-Inférieure than in the Gironde. The journey was uneventful but, dressed in his full sans-culotte costume, Bonie had difficulty in convincing the terrified Grégoire and his wife of his loyalty until he thought to show them a slip of paper, written in Lucie’s hand, which he had fortunately stitched into his jacket. The return journey was slow, for Frédéric was not strong, and the months of anxiety and concealment had taken their toll. Lucie, having calculated the hour and the exact time she expected to see him, went down to the quay where the travellers were to arrive. But Frédéric did not appear.
The river grew dark, the curfew was sounded and she could think only of her stupidity at having entrusted the life of the person she loved most in the world to a revolutionary she barely knew. Desolate, she spent a sleepless night listening for sounds that he might have arrived by some other means, imagining Frédéric arrested, recognised and dragged to the scaffold. The house had never seemed to her so still. ‘If I had an enemy,’ Lucie wrote later, ‘I could not wish for him any worse punishment than the mortal agony I endured.’
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