Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (47 page)

By early 1796 Thérésia was established as Barras’s mistress. Although he was reticent about the exact nature of their relationship in his memoirs–and far more loyal to her than he was to Joséphine–they were frequently seen in public arm in arm. Thérésia made no secret of her disdain for Tallien and acted as Barras’s hostess at lavish receptions in his official apartments in the Luxembourg and at the house parties he gave at his country house, Grosbois (once the property of one of Louis XVI’s brothers), just outside Paris.

Thérésia was probably also taking other lovers, a circumstance which seems to have left the amoral Barras unmoved. ‘It was a known
fact that Mme Tallien braved her husband to a certain extent, when she wished to love another than him,’ he wrote, commending her for preserving her decorum. Her liaisons, said Barras–and who knew better?–‘were for her genuine enjoyments to which she brought all the ardour and passion of her temperament’. In London, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire’s sister Lady Bessborough heard that Thérésia ‘has not taken vows of chastity, but is not by any means as much the reverse as is pretended’.

Despite Barras’s detachment, or perhaps because of her passionate temperament, theirs was still a tempestuous relationship. Barras also took other lovers–men as well as women, it was rumoured, though no evidence of his homosexuality survives. Observers reported frequent arguments and reconciliations. But their mutual dedication was unshakeable, utterly different in nature from Thérésia’s relationship with her husband. She always concluded her letters to Barras with sentiments like, ‘I love you and will love you all my life, with a devotion nothing can touch’, and she meant it.

The intimacy of the little coterie at the heart of Directory life, centred on Thérésia, is revealed in the letters written to Joséphine by Napoléon from Italy in the spring of 1796. In the midst of white-hot protestations of adoration, in which Napoléon declared that he could not live without his Joséphine, he tortured himself by picturing her not thinking of him, imagining her with Thérésia, dining with Barras or playing with her bad-tempered pug. At the bottom of every letter were messages for her friends: remembrances to Barras, Thérésia, Tallien and often to their children. When seven-year-old Théodore de Fontenay started at boarding school Thérésia requested that he be allowed to share a room with Eugène de Beauharnais, Joséphine’s son, and Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoléon’s brother, so that he would feel at home.

Finally Napoléon persuaded Joséphine to join him on campaign. Thérésia invited her teenaged daughter, Hortense, to stay at La Chaumière while her mother was away, but Hortense was less malleable than her brother Eugéne. Assheputit, she ‘stubbornly’ refused, preferring to stay on at school for the holidays. Thérésia may not have realized it, but staying at La Chaumière would have ruined Hortense’s reputation.

Joséphine’s letters from Milan betray her homesickness. Despite
the round of splendid parties held in her honour, she was bored to death, she told Thérésia; all she could do to cheer herself up was talk to other people about her ‘
chère Thérésita
’ for whom she was busy hunting out the antiquities that she loved. ‘Ah, if she were here, I would be more happy,’ she continued, asking for news of home, of Tallien, of Barras and of the children, especially her two-year-old god-daughter Rose-Thermidor, and lamenting her foolishness in marrying Napoléon. If it were not for him, she would still be Thérésia’s ‘dear little mother’, Joséphine wrote, referring to their ten-year age gap, and sending her ‘
mille baisers bien tendres
’. She sent a bolt of crêpe and a couple of straw hats back to Thérésia, some coral for Rose-Thermidor and cheeses for Tallien’s breakfast; she told Thérésia how happy she was to have received a letter from Barras, whom she adored.

To outside eyes, the almost incestuous nature of this dense web of relationships at the centre of the new government was evidence of its fundamental corruption, and Thérésia became the focus of a swelling tide of censure. Napoléon’s friend Junot described leaving Barras’s apartments in the Luxembourg, while Napoléon was away winning battle after battle in Italy, with Joséphine on one arm and Thérésia on the other. Hordes of people pressed in to stare, pointing Joséphine out as ‘Notre Dame des Victoires’–‘and see who is on the other side of the officer;–that is Notre Dame de Septembre!’

The press, too, for so long her champions, began to turn against Thérésia. In the spring of 1796 the
Tableau de Paris
, sarcastically listing her accomplishments, marvelled at how ‘a woman of so many talents has found the secret of boring all the world!’ At the same time, across the Channel, Thérésia’s exotic beauty was transformed beneath James Gillray’s biting pen into something altogether more coarse, reflecting the racism of the day, with thick frizzy hair and African features. Some years later, satirizing Napoléon’s rise to power, Gillray portrayed Thérésia and Joséphine dancing naked and bejewelled for a sozzled Barras while Napoléon peeped hungrily out from behind a curtain.

Thérésia’s evident adultery and her suspected promiscuity gave the press and the public ample scope for criticism. Early one morning, returning home alone from a ball, her dark red coach was attacked by thieves. An admirer who was following her chased them away. ‘Moved
to tears at this proof of the young man’s solicitude for her welfare,’ Thérésia ‘insisted on his driving home with her’, reported the
Petite Poste
, adding that her cavalier did not leave La Chaumière until the next afternoon. ‘Her humanity is so general that she is now as unwilling that any man shd pine away in an hopeless passion for her, as she was anxious to save those persons who under Robespierre’s reign were destined for the guillotine,’ wrote one visitor to Paris. When she walked out in public, people stuck signs to her back reading ‘
Propriété Nationale
’ or ‘
Res Publica
’ [literally, ‘public thing’]. ‘They begin to make so many jokes about her that she is quite to be pitied.’ Confronted by rude and staring crowds, Thérésia maintained an extraordinarily dignified imperturbability.

Without naming her friend, even Germaine–one of the women to whom Thérésia attributed her initial fall from virtue before the revolution, and herself a notorious adulteress–bemoaned the erosion of manners and respect in Directory society. ‘How shall a pure and proud model of woman be found in a country where social relations are not guarded by the most vigorous propriety?’ she asked. In a republic, where distinctions between people are based solely on personal qualities, she argued, both men and women ought to be doubly scrupulous about their behaviour.

But despite the general denigration of her actions, Thérésia remained the most celebrated woman in Paris. She exemplified her age. When Lord Granville Leveson Gower arrived from London as part of a peace mission in October 1796 he told his mistress, Lady Bessborough, that Paris was ‘by far the most profligate place I ever set my foot in; there does not appear to be a remnant of any thing like virtue or principle’. All Lady Bessborough wanted to hear about was Thérésia Tallien: what she looked like, what she wore, how she behaved. Gower confirmed that she and Joséphine were ‘the only women much admired at Paris’, and added that his best chance of seeing them was at one of the public balls. Thérésia’s dresses all came from London, Gower reported, and he ordered a wig for his beloved from her wigmaker.

Thérésia’s perceived depravity mirrored the lavish dissolution of the society that both reviled and adored her. The Directory was a period of corruption and lassitude, its rule, in Tocqueville’s words,
‘nothing but anarchy tempered by violence’. The men who controlled its administration were ‘second-rate revolutionaries’ who occupied the government, but did not govern. Helen Williams said that some of them were former Jacobins who had sacrificed their principles for power, others were simply speculators and gamblers, while most were ‘indifferents, who, from a sort of benevolence of temperament generally voted with the moderate side of the house’ but who, when their stomachs started rumbling, would abandon the debates on which the salvation of their country hung, throw off their official robes, ‘and the first sound they utter is
soupe à la tartare
’.

Only the army (and the men who supplied it), sweeping to victory under Napoléon’s command, was thriving. Clumsy, inept laws were decreed and ignored by people who lacked the strength either to obey or to resist them. In February 1796 the
assignats
, the paper money on which the economy officially depended, were worth no more than they cost to print. The Directory government spent more time debating what its official costumes should be than in seeking to engage the exhausted, cynical public with their regime.

It was not until 1798 that the councillors and deputies began wearing their long-awaited uniforms, flowing red toga-style capes, ‘like tragedy heroes’, over blue coats, tricolour sashes and dramatically plumed hats. Since a man’s politics were thought to be revealed in his dress and demeanour, it was hoped that fitting out the nation’s leaders in classical dress would mould them into ideal classical rulers. But inspired by the same impulse to fancy dress that motivated Thérésia and the
merveilleuses
, the gilt-trimmed costumes’ very theatricality, according to one onlooker, prevented them from being ‘seriously dignified and truly imposing’. Barras, tall, elegant and deadpan, was one of the few men it suited–but he preferred to wear his own clothes.

Germaine de Staël, who had spent most of 1796 with her father at Coppet in Switzerland, talking, writing, finally falling in love with Benjamin Constant, and trying in vain to persuade the French govern
ment that she was a French citizen and thus could not be prevented from returning to the country of her birth–they countered that she was the daughter of one foreigner and the wife of another–arrived back in Paris in May 1797. She was eight months pregnant.

Although her husband was no longer Swedish ambassador, Germaine set up house once again in the rue du Bac, where she gave birth to a daughter with Benjamin’s flame-red hair. Within a week of her accouchement she was sending out invitations to dinner.

‘I still love this country,’ she had written to a cousin, when she crossed the border into France; she felt she had come home. ‘We have hardly any security, no money at all, and much discomfort. But there is meaning in the very air one breathes, there is energy, there is a kind of welcome from people known and unknown which one feels in one’s own country.’ Germaine found in France, she said, ‘more space to live in, less limited thinking even among common people; a sweeter air, what can I say?’

Recent elections had brought into the Directory, for the first time, a majority of constitutional monarchists. People began to parade their royalist sympathies openly, wearing black collars on their coats as coded mourning for Louis XVI or clothes embroidered with fleurs-de-lis or white plumes; ladies’ fans bore the spangled motto ‘
Vive le roi!
’ Returned émigrés made a point of speaking English to show that they had spent the revolutionary years across the Channel, even though most had not bothered to learn the language while they were there. ‘When in public we even made a rather amusing pretence of poverty, eating for instance, out of
culs noirs
, as though china were too costly. It was the height of good manners to be ruined, to have been suspected, persecuted, and above all, imprisoned,’ remembered Auguste François de Frénilly. ‘People greatly regretted that they had not been guillotined, but said they were to have been the day after or two days after the 9th of Thermidor.’ Even Barras was said to be prouder of his pre-revolutionary title of viscount than of being a Director of the new Republic.

In late 1796 another former aristocrat, Talleyrand, had returned to France from the United States, where he had spent some time with Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her family on their homestead in upstate
New York. Germaine, who had been instrumental in having his name struck off the list of émigrés barred from returning to France, was delighted to be reunited with her old friend. She and Thérésia Tallien set about introducing him to Directory society, recommending him to Barras as a man–a republican–of talent and diplomacy. ‘No man,’ said Talleyrand, ‘could equal a woman in serving the interests of a friend or lover.’ Barras appointed him Minister for Foreign Affairs the following July, allowing Benjamin Constant (as a compliment to Germaine) to tell him of his new post. While they drove to the Luxembourg, so that Talleyrand could thank Barras for the appointment, Talleyrand could talk of nothing but the vast fortune he hoped to make.

Germaine continued what Joseph Fouché, once Barras and Tallien’s accomplice in Robespierre’s fall and soon to become Napoléon’s chief of police, called her ‘intriguing’ throughout the spring and summer of 1797. She was trusted by neither side. ‘Who has asked you to meddle in matters that are of no concern to you?’ demanded a royalist newspaper. ‘Miserable hermaphrodite that you are, your sole ambition in uniting the two sexes in your person is to dishonour them both at once!’

Despite the prominent social and cultural role seized by women like Thérésia during the Directory, as this attack on Germaine shows the misogyny that had characterized the early revolutionaries was still very much alive; it was one of the few attitudes shared by the Robespierrists of 1793–4 and the Directory government. In 1795, echoing Antoine Saint-Just’s views on female education, the Committee of State Education was hearing suggestions that schoolgirls should spend their time washing their brothers’ shirts. A report the following year confirmed that women’s principal role was that of mother. Female sexual desire was thus not only useless but dangerous, since it interfered with the fulfilment of their sole obligation to society.

Although Barras had praised Thérésia’s easy, uninhibited sexual nature he did not want to see women stepping out of a purely domestic role; part of his criticism of Joséphine stemmed from his disapproval of her using sex for gain. ‘Far from contesting the superior merit women may have displayed in the various ranks of society,’ he wrote in his memoirs, describing how he had pointedly declined an invitation
from Manon Roland to dine at the Ministry of the Interior in 1792, ‘I have rarely found that their happiness or that of others was in any way bettered by their unsexing themselves and taking upon themselves men’s duties.’