Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (68 page)
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Authors: Lucy Moore
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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The Estates-General had changed its name to the ‘National Assembly’ on 17 June 1789, three days before the Tennis Court Oath in which the deputies swore to remain in session until France had a constitution; over the next three years it would become, successively, the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly. As contemporaries usually did, in the main I have referred to it as the National Assembly.
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Her French accusers said Théroigne de Méricourt had boasted of forming this club.
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Thérésia’s account of her birth is just one example of this tendency: she claimed to have been born in Madrid at a grand ball given by the French ambassador, altough records show she was actually born in Carabancel, just outside Madrid.
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Porcia Catonis was a Roman matron who committed suicide by swallowing hot coals when her husband Brutus was defeated in battle by Marc Anthony; Mucius Scaevola put his hand into a fire to demonstrate his patriotism. The implication is that women could also be patriots.
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Similar feelings of resentment arose in German-occupied Paris during the Second World War. ‘In years when an egg was a magnificent luxury,’ writes Miranda Seymour in
The Bugatti Queen
(London, 2004), ‘food was increasingly associated with the idea of power. The German alone had regular access to good food in Paris; while their hosts starved, they ate like victors.’
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In 1785 Sir Joshua Reynolds bought Bernini’s fountain of Neptune holding a trident with a Triton at his feet, originally made for the Villa Negroni; he considered it the finest work of its type.
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