Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (37 page)

Tallien was the only child of elderly parents, but he had no ancestors and no fortune–not even a baptism record or a birth certificate–and he was assumed by many to be a bastard. Although he had benefited from his upbringing in an aristocratic household he had never been considered part of the family; he was both too well educated to feel himself one of the people and too poor to believe his dreams were within his grasp. That he was sympathetic to the caste in whose milieu he had grown up was evident from his actions during the September massacres, when he protected Germaine de Staël’s friends and saved the king’s former valet from execution; but, equally, the zeal with which he embraced the revolution suggests that he recognized he could fulfil his potential only under a new regime.

Thérésia, fifteen when the Bastille was stormed and nineteen in 1793, was also a child of the revolution. She had absorbed its democratic ideas at the Convention and in popular societies; she had watched Mirabeau, Danton and probably even Tallien himself expound the policies and philosophies that were transforming her world. The influence of her aristocratic but dedicated Montagnard ex-lover, Félix Lepeletier, had helped her see herself as a revolutionary and a republican. She was impressionable enough to regard Tallien the
représentant
not as a printer’s apprentice thrust by circumstance into a position of power but as a genuinely important man whose greatness would be enhanced by her presence at his side. Equally, the vicissitudes of the revolution had given her a matchless instinct for survival; at some level, she loved Tallien because she believed he could protect her.

For his part, Tallien was enthralled by the glamour Thérésia represented. He had grown up close to but excluded from the glittering aristocratic world that meant everything in ancien régime France. Bold, sophisticated, seductive Thérésia was his chance to breathe that rarefied air, and he could not resist her. The intensity of their affair was fostered by the crisis atmosphere of heightened reality in which they were living. Throughout the revolution lovers like Thérésia and Tallien, like Manon Roland and Buzot, thrived on a potent combination of fear and exhilaration, idealism and desperation. Emotions were much closer to the surface when death was so near and life was so precious.

As early as 18 November, agents for the Committee of Public Safety were writing back to Paris denouncing Tallien ‘for having intimate relations with the Cabarrus woman, wife of the ex-aristocrat Fontenay, who has so much influence over him that she has become the
protectrice
of her caste, nobles, bankers and hoarders’. Even though the revolution had legitimized divorce, the fact that Thérésia was no longer married to an aristocrat did not absolve her from suspicion. ‘If this woman stays close to Tallien any longer,’ the spies continued, ‘the regime’s reputation will fall into discredit.’

They were right to suspect that Tallien’s liaison with Thérésia would diminish his effectiveness as a revolutionary enforcer. From the very start of their relationship, Thérésia had no scruples about using her influence over Tallien to save her friends. Emboldened by her hold over him, she had already appeared before the newly established revolutionary committee to plead the case of the widow of an executed Girondin, even though a decree of 25 October made anyone who pleaded mercy for a detainee themselves subject to arrest. It would not
take long for desperate fugitives to discover that the way to the
représentant
was through his mistress’s soft heart.

Soon after Thérésia returned to Bordeaux in October from Bagnéres, she received a note from an unnamed woman asking for an interview, who said she had met ‘Mme de Fontenay’ in Paris and knew that she was ‘as good as she is beautiful’. Thérésia replied that she could come whenever she liked. Half an hour later, Lucy de la Tour du Pin, a former lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette who had met Thérésia in Paris at the opera with their mutual friend Dondon de Lameth, walked into the Hôtel Franklin disguised as a good bourgeoise in a skirt and fitted waistcoat with a red kerchief around her hair.

The former marquise was living in hiding in Bordeaux, hoping to have the sequestration on her father-in-law’s property lifted so that she and her young family could return to live there. She begged Thérésia for advice, and Thérésia told her she would arrange a meeting with Tallien. ‘You will be safe as soon as he knows that you are my main interest here,’ she assured her. Mme de la Tour du Pin left, ‘encouraged by the interest she had shown and wondering why she should have shown it’. The following night at ten o’clock, as directed, she returned to the Hôtel Franklin. Thérésia was there, and her candlelit rooms were full of people, but Tallien had not yet arrived. Eventually the rumbling of his carriage–one of the few remaining in the city–was heard on the cobblestones outside. Thérésia sent the trembling Lucy in to see him.

At first, she did not dare to look directly at Tallien, who was waiting for her, leaning against the wall. He questioned her, gently at first and then closely, about what she wanted and why. When she replied to questions about her family with the names of well known courtiers and royalists, he said brusquely, ‘All these enemies of the Republic will have to go’, making a ‘beheading gesture’ with his hand. Indignation made Mme de la Tour du Pin bold: she raised her eyes to ‘the monster’ and saw in front of her a young man of about twenty-six–just a few years older than her–whose pretty face, which he tried to make look stern, was surrounded by a mass of unruly blond curls escaping from a shiny military hat with a tricolour plume.

‘I have not come here, citizen,’ she said, ‘to hear the death warrant
of my relatives, and since you cannot grant my request, I will not importune you further.’ She left him–smiling slightly, as if bemused by her impudence–and went home convinced that all hope was lost. Thérésia was less easily discouraged. She accused Tallien of not being kind to her friend, and he promised she would not be arrested; but for the moment there was little more he could do.

Towards the end of November Tallien heard news from Paris that his father had died. He applied for leave to visit his mother–he was her only child–but did not go. It appears that the Parisian spies had secretly obtained a warrant for Thérésia’s arrest and, without Tallien’s knowledge, had her imprisoned in late November or early December. Thérésia stayed in the forbidding Fort du Hâ just long enough to receive lasting scars on her feet and legs from the rats who nibbled at prisoners foolish enough to fall asleep, before Tallien engineered her release and saved her from the guillotine. It was said that Thérésia’s first-hand account of the barbarity with which prisoners were treated prompted Tallien to tour the dungeon himself. He banned uselessly harsh measures forbidding visitors, and ordered the gaolers to allow the inmates to walk on the terrace each day. A grateful prisoner composed a carmagnole in Thérésia’s honour.

Thérésia was free in time to attend Bordeaux’s own Festival of Reason on the cold, clear morning of 10 December, a month after the Parisian celebrations. An actress representing Reason led the procession of carts bearing the local churches’ treasures and the usual white-clad girls through the city, to the accompaniment of military bands playing revolutionary songs. The riches plundered from the churches were burned on an enormous pyre.
Représentant
Ysabeau, a former priest, gave a speech in praise of the reign of Reason.

‘Consider my terror that same evening,’ wrote Mme de la Tour du Pin, when Thérésia casually told her that Tallien had said that he thought Lucy ‘would make a beautiful Goddess of Reason’. Horrified, Lucy replied that she would prefer to die, but the pragmatic Thérésia, ‘surprised’, simply shrugged her shoulders’.

Three days later, at seven forty-five on a dark winter’s evening, five men attacked Tallien in the street, but did not manage to kill him. Thérésia may have been softening Tallien’s heart in individual cases,
and resistance to the revolution was still fierce, as this attack showed, but the
représentants
’ work of subduing the seditious Gironde region was gradually bearing fruit. By Christmas Tallien and Ysabeau were close to establishing control over the exhausted, hungry inhabitants of Bordeaux. Tallien wrote to tell his mother of the attempt on his life but dismissed her fears for his safety. ‘Such is the fate of those who fight for liberty. We must forget ourselves and think of nothing but the well-being of the twenty-five million men we are charged with protecting.’

On 22 December, Ysabeau wrote to inform the Committee of Public Safety that Tallien appeared to be married to ‘
une étrangére
’ and added, ‘for the falseness of the pretended marriage, consult General Brune, who has a stronger connection with the lady in question than Tallien’. Guillaume Brune was a talented young general stationed in Bordeaux with whom Thérésia had also been flirting; at Tallien’s suggestion, he had just been recalled to Paris. Ysabeau’s impassioned denunciation of Tallien’s rival suggests that he too may have harboured contradictory feelings for Thérésia, at once desirous and censorious; or perhaps that, despite his disapproval of his friend’s liaison, he wanted him to be happy.

After Brune’s departure, no serious rivals for Thérésia’s affections remained. By the end of December, she and Tallien were an established couple. Nearly every day they could be seen driving around Bordeaux in an open carriage, with Thérésia in the guise of Liberty, holding a pike and wearing the provocative
bonnet rouge
, leaning her exquisite head on her lover’s shoulder. Although fashion magazines had been recommending since 1792 (and until they stopped being published the next spring) that women should wear muted colours like brown and grey instead of patriotic but inflammatory red, white and blue, Thérésia was quite unafraid that her highly politicized costumes would attract the wrong kind of attention, and probably unaware of the fate that had befallen the républicaines-révolutionnaires earlier that autumn in Paris.

A
fête triomphale
was held on 30 December to celebrate the revolutionary army’s recapture of Toulon from the British. Ships with all their pennants flying were anchored in the harbour, salvos were fired, hymns to liberty sung and a procession of town officials and girls in
white dresses made its way once again to the new Temple of Reason. Thérésia had been invited to write a
Discours sur l’Éducation
for the occasion, which Tallien read out for her. ‘His heavy and monotonous style’, as one observer described it, did not distract the audience from the sermon’s author, sitting beside the
représentants
in a dark blue cashmere
amazone
of military cut, with yellow buttons, scarlet cuffs and a fur-trimmed scarlet velvet hat perched on her dark curls cut
à la Titus
.

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.’