Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

by Moore, Lucy

  Thérésia had a special interest in the education of children, because her former lover Félix Lepeletier’s brother Michel had been working on a scheme for national state schools at the time of his murder in January 1793. Her speech showed her dedication to the ideas of Rousseau and John Locke, her devotion to liberty and to the Republic, as well as her own tender, unconstrained nature. Pedantry and dry scholasticism should be removed from children’s schooling; courage, grace and virtue should be instilled in their hearts; and luxurious clothes, she added, were ‘enemies to moral and republican dignity’. Her heartfelt appeal to méres de familles–‘remember that a careless, negligent mother is a public catastrophe that society should treat with all possible contempt’–can be read as a reproach to her own ambitious, unfeeling mother. ‘Sacred liberty, stir up their [children’s] hearts,’ she concluded. ‘Already everybody wants to bow down before you; as at the dawn of a beautiful day, the shade and the sun still clash over our blue fields, but the dim part of this enchanted scene will soon disappear…’ The discourse was greeted with such acclaim that she was urged to have it published as a pamphlet; as author, she signed herself ‘citoyenne Cabarrus Fontenay’.

  Ten days later the speech was read out again, this time by Thérésia herself. The duchesse d’Abrantes, who did not think Tallien had done justice to his mistress’s words, speculated that the change came about because Thérésia had been irritated by his original delivery. ‘At intervals the expression of her countenance showed that she was a little out of humour at the manner in which the discourse was read, and on the following décadi she read it herself in the church of the Franciscans.’

  Although Thérésia’s address reflected received republican wisdom about a woman’s most important role being that of mother to future republicans, her own irrepressible independence and self-respect set the tone for her arguments. While applauding the idea of state education, she did not distinguish between the education boys and girls should receive–something the radical Jacobin, Saint-Just, was recommending. Crucially, the confidence she demonstrated in expressing her opinion in such testing times reveals her as a woman unwilling to confine herself to a private, domestic sphere.

  While Lucy de la Tour du Pin waited for news on her application to Tallien, she saw Thérésia regularly during the winter of 1793–4. She echoed the feelings of many Bordeaux residents about Thérésia when she said that despite her unconventional private life and intimacy with a man many saw as a murderer, the evidence of her goodness was so abundant that it was impossible not to warm to her. Her rooms in the Hôtel Franklin were nicknamed the Bureau des Grâces–a pun on the French word grâce, which means both elegance and favour or mercy. When she complained that the guillotine occupied too intimidating a position in the town, directly outside Tallien’s office and rooms in the Place Nationale–the roll of the drum notifying all Bordeaux’s citizens when the next death was imminent–it was moved away and placed inside the prison walls.

  The dangers to which she exposed herself only intensified the pleasure she received from imperilling her life for others. As she wrote to her son, many years later, she felt an elation and an abnegation of the self at sharing the fears of those more unfortunate than herself. ‘I risked my life with joy, again and again: if I died, I would go to heaven, if I was saved I would live blessed by those who owed me their existence.’

  Lucy was with Thérésia one day as she waited for news of the fate of a man for whom she had pleaded with Tallien. When Tallien’s secretary, Alexandre (by coincidence, the former secretary of Louis de Narbonne, Germaine de Staël’s one-time lover), arrived at the Hôtel Franklin and informed them that the man had been acquitted, Thérésia and Lucy ran breathlessly through the streets to his house, ‘stopping for neither hat nor shawl’, to tell his wife and daughters that he had been saved. ‘She rushed in like a mad thing, crying, “He’s acquitted”…[the wife] threw herself to the floor at Mme de Fontenay’s knees, kissing her feet. The girls kissed her dress. I have never seen such a pathetic scene,’ Lucy wrote later. Numerous stories survive recounting the lengths to which Thérésia went to save the lives not just of her friends but of anyone whose story moved her to pity. A Mme de Gage was provided with false passports by Thérésia, enabling her to leave the country. ‘You are an aristocrat, Madame,’ said Mme de Gage, thankful but perplexed. ‘I confess it,’ replied Thérésia. ‘Alas! But I love Tallien.’

  Detractors accused Thérésia of accepting money and jewels for the pardons and passports she extracted from Tallien, but no proof supporting these allegations exists and Thérésia was rich enough in her own right not to want to be paid for her generosity. Hungry for attention and adulation, the satisfaction she felt in her own achievements and the praise she received from the grateful beneficiaries of her goodness, who called her ‘divine, heavenly libératrice’ and offered her ‘admiration, adoration and devotion until death’, were thanks enough.

  Lucy de la Tour du Pin exonerated Thérésia from any kind of avarice, but related a story in which représentant Ysabeau told a young woman that he would free her husband for the enormous sum of 25,000 francs in gold–a currency strictly prohibited by the revolutionary regime. He took payment of the money that she had scraped together and told the woman that her husband had already left prison; what he did not mention was that he was on his way to the scaffold. Thérésia confirmed that Ysabeau ‘loved gold’, while she made Tallien give passports away for nothing; like a child with arguing parents, she learned to exploit their differences to obtain the papers she wanted.

  Both Ysabeau and Tallien were criticized for greed and for relishing the spoils of their rank while the common people starved. The winter of 1793–4 was a harsh one, and famine gripped France again. By the end of 1793, sugar had gone up five times in price since the start of the revolution, candles seven times and the cost of wine and brandy had doubled. Bordeaux was reduced to misery, remembered one of Tallien’s political enemies, Louis Prudhomme, in 1797, while the tables of ‘these new Luculluses’ groaned beneath the weight of the finest wines and the most exquisite delicacies.*

  The people of Bordeaux called fine white bread–the kind that they could no longer obtain from the bakeries–‘pain des représentants’ and Lucy de la Tour du Pin remembered that the butchers saved the best cuts of meats for the représentants’ table. However, when they were recalled to Paris in the spring of 1794, accused of moderation and clemency, Ysabeau and Tallien swore that they had not appropriated government funds. Tallien declared that he had eaten bread made from grass while he was in Bordeaux. ‘Luxury suits neither my principles nor my tastes,’ he wrote. The fact that he left Bordeaux as poor as when he arrived suggests at the very least that he was not selling pardons to enrich himself; love–for Thérésia–seems to have been his only motivation.

  When rumours of high-living reached Paris and the Committee of Public Safety, Ysabeau and Tallien were forced to write back defending themselves. They lived like ‘vrai sans-culottes’, they said, in the modest cells of the former seminary, on the Convention’s prescribed amount of six livres a day. In view of the recent attempt on Tallien’s life, their bodyguards were necessary, if only to maintain order in their permanently crowded offices.

  Late in January, fearful of where these rumours would lead, Thérésia sent a copy of her Discours sur l’Education to a member of the Committee of Public Safety, whom she knew well, she said, through a mutual friend. Her speech was a pretext: she was hoping for his support, should she ever need it. The letter concluded, ‘believe in the esteem and fraternal sentiments of Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay’.

  It may have done more harm than good. Her letter was received eight days after she sent it, in early February. On the 8th the Committee of Public Safety wrote directly to Tallien and Ysabeau, chastising them for forming relationships in Bordeaux that might affect their duties. Tallien responded five days later with another dignified defence: he and Ysabeau were scrupulously observing every edict and the Comm
ittee would find nothing with which to reproach them. They were combining, he said, the inflexible severity of the law with justice and humanity.

  That same month Thérésia made another attempt to win over the Committee by donating 9,000 livres to the desperately empty coffers of the Convention. A decree of August 1793 allowed people to donate–or required them to donate–large sums of money to help repay the vast national debt.

  But Parisian scrutiny did not deter Thérésia’s efforts to save lives. In February, by threatening to leave Tallien if he did not help her friend, she managed to get passports for Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her family to leave France for Martinique, their hopes of remaining in France having been dashed. She and Tallien arrived unexpectedly one day when Lucy was sitting down to lunch in the small house in the middle of a vineyard where she was staying just outside Bordeaux. Tallien approached Lucy ‘with all the grace of manner which had characterised the great gentlemen of the former court and said in the kindest possible way, “I understand, Madame, that I can today make amends for the wrongs I have done to you, and I wish to do so.”’

  The figures show that during the five months between December 1793 and May 1794, when Thérésia left Bordeaux, only seventy-six people were executed by order of the city’s revolutionary committee. In the two months thereafter those numbers nearly tripled, coming into line with other rebellious regions like Toulon, Nantes and Lyon, on which the central government was trying to impose its rule.

  Thérésia’s role as an effective petitioner for mercy was one of the few sanctioned for women by the Jacobin regime, though little heed was paid to their entreaties elsewhere. In Lyon in December 1793, which had been renamed Ville-Affranchie, or Liberated City, after it fell to the revolutionary army in October, ten thousand women signed a petition begging the authorities to spare the city’s inhabitants from further bloodshed. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Nearly two thousand people were executed there during the winter and spring of 1794–including more than two hundred on a single bloody day.

  In mid-February, as the atmosphere of suspicion and fear in Bordeaux escalated, Thérésia suspected that she might be pregnant and sent for a midwife. The woman who came to see her was hiding an aristocrat in her house, disguised as a patient. Mme Lage de Volude had escaped France in 1789 but returned to Bordeaux to see her family on a false passport, on which she was no longer able to travel. When the midwife saw the piles of passports lying on Thérésia’s desk, she asked Frenelle who they belonged to. Frenelle replied that her mistress had much influence over Tallien, and helped brave people in distress–especially émigrés. A short while later, using a false name, Mme Lage de Volude gave Frenelle a diamond necklace to ask her mistress to help her.

  When the woman came to see Thérésia a few days later she was still ill in bed, but no malady could detract from her dazzling beauty. Thérésia greeted her like a long-lost friend, saying she thought she recognized her from a meeting at a masonic lodge a few years earlier. Her openness and candour surprised her visitor. Laughingly, she began telling Mme Lage de Volude how she had sent a portrait of herself, painted for Tallien, to her former lover Félix Lepeletier. Although Lepeletier had treated her badly, she said, nothing could break their attachment. The members of the Surveillance Committee, who hated her, had ordered the packet opened and sent to Tallien. He had come to see her the day before in a fury, she continued, ‘spitting blood’ and threatening to send her to the guillotine. She had received him in a state of perfect calm, convinced him of the innocence of her note and the stupidity of the Committee, and persuaded him to return the portrait to her. Recklessly, Thérésia told Mme Lage de Volude that Tallien ‘was paying dear and long for the wickedness he had committed’.

  On subsequent visits, Thérésia continued to open up to Mme Lage de Volude. She confided ‘that she had always wanted to be the mistress of a king [and] that she needed occupation with affairs of state and great power’. Charles IV of Spain had taken a fancy to her, she claimed, and she had had to leave the country. Mme Lage de Volude added here that Thérésia was deceiving herself: she had heard of no woman for whom Charles IV had shown a preference.

  Tallien was desperate to marry her, but Thérésia had told him that she could not marry without the consent of her father, who was being held in prison in Madrid (imprisoned by the king she claimed desired her) and to whom she could not get a letter. ‘Hand me your letter,’ said Tallien, ‘and I give you my word that in fifteen days or three weeks you will have an answer.’ Thérésia protested: it was impossible. ‘Believe that nothing is impossible for us,’ he declared.

  Thérésia told her new friend that she had written to her father but told him nothing about the ‘pretended marriage’. A few weeks later, full of impatience and excitement, Tallien brought her the response. When she calmly put the letter in her pocket he demanded to know what the answer had been. ‘He did not speak of that which you are looking for,’ she told him. ‘I have never seen a more foolish face than his,’ she gloated to Mme Lage de Volude.

  Despite the contradictions of her feelings for Tallien, Thérésia was seriously considering marrying him. During one of their last meetings, she asked Mme Lage de Volude for her advice. Predictably, her friend questioned the legitimacy of a marriage made by a municipal act, instead of in a church. ‘Believe me: you will make your life a public scandal and you will make yourself dependent on a man whom you do not respect.’ She urged Thérésia to reunite with Fontenay so that when the Thémigrés–and morality–returned to France they would welcome her back into their sweet and consoling society. Tallien was a régicide who had ‘committed all possible crimes’; marrying him would only bring her dishonour and social ostracization, despite all the good she had done.

  Thérésia replied that she wished she had known no one except people as worthy as Mme Lage de Volude, but confessed she had been alternately alienated by the decorum of her husband’s family and led into waywardness by her friends. Women like Dondon de Lameth, Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis had, with their wild parties and misbehaviour, led her into temptation, and she had lost her moral compass. It was not passion that attached her to Tallien, she continued, but ‘a sort of honour and duty’, since she was responsible for the dangers to which he was exposed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I will not abandon him.’ If Tallien defeated his enemies and rose to power, she said, Mme Lage de Volude and her friends could count on her friendship.

  Despite her ingrained disapproval of Thérésia, Mme Lage de Volude admitted she could not help liking and even respecting her. One night at dinner–after Thérésia had cried over the women’s predicament and made Tallien sign a passport for her as he climbed into his carriage on his way out of Bordeaux–she burst out, ‘You women of feeling and grand principles, you have a very bad opinion of me; but I hold, and I will prove to anyone, that I have done much more good than you because for many months, I have not slept without having saved someone’s life; while you others, with your royalism and all your romantic sentiments, I beg you to tell me how you have been useful?’

  Tallien left Bordeaux for Paris on 22 February; Mme Lage de Volude’s passport was the last he signed for Thérésia. He had realized that he could only defend himself against his enemies in person, in Paris–before it was too late.

  Lucy de la Tour du Pin arrived at the Hôtel Franklin two hours after his departure to find Thérésia in tears. The faithful Alexandre, Tallien’s secretary, who had been left behind in Ysabeau’s service, rushed off to obtain for Lucy the last signatures she needed. He assured her that Ysabeau signed papers without really looking at them as he left the theatre, because he was in such a hurry to get to his supper. Sure enough, Alexandre returned near midnight with the visas, ‘so out of breath that he fell into an armchair, unable to say more than: “Here it is.” Mme de Fontenay embraced him most warmly, and so did I, for it was really he who saved us,’ wrote Lucy later. ‘I have never seen him since; he may have paid with his life for the services he rendered to
so many people who have forgotten all about them.’

  One other person was waiting with Lucy and Thérésia for Alexandre’s return: a sullen, silent M. de Fontenay. Lucy turned to leave, but Thérésia held her back, saying she would send someone home with her later, but ‘first she wanted to show me something pretty’. She opened a jewel box and emptied it on to a handkerchief she had spread on a table. Magnificent diamond necklaces of the finest quality tumbled out over one another. Thérésia showed them to Lucy and then tied the corners of the handkerchief together and handed it to her ex-husband. He took the bundle and left, still without a word. ‘He gave me some of them; the remainder came from my mother,’ Thérésia told the amazed Lucy. ‘He, too, is leaving tomorrow for America.’

  When Lucy de la Tour du Pin, her husband and her two young children finally boarded their ship in Bordeaux harbour, Thérésia came to bid them farewell, ‘her lovely face wet with tears of joy’.

  Tallien returned to Paris to find the city tense and cowering beneath Robespierre’s rule. ‘Anarchy from within, invasion from without. A country cracking from outside pressure, disintegrating from internal strain. Revolution at its height. War. Inflation. Hunger. Fear. Hate. Sabotage. Fantastic hopes. Boundless idealism,’ writes the historian Robert Palmer of this period. ‘And the horrible knowledge, for the men in power, that if they failed they would die as criminals, murderers of their king. And that dread that all the gains of the Revolution would be lost. And the faith that if they won they would bring Liberty, Equality and Fraternity into the world.’

  Three weeks before Tallien’s arrival, on 5 February, Robespierre addressed the National Convention on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety. ‘If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue,…during revolution [it] is both virtue and terror–virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue is powerless,’ he declared. ‘Terror is nothing more nor less than prompt, severe and inflexible justice.’ He denounced tyrannies as if unaware that his own regime was becoming one. ‘We seek an order of things in which all the base and cruel passions are enchained,’ he said, while hundreds of people were going to their deaths each day. Individuals’ freedom and even their lives did not seem such precious commodities when the future of the French Republic, which he believed it was his mission to establish, was at stake.