Читать книгу Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France - Lucy Moore - Страница 10

We continued to dance, as they do in camp on the eve of a battle.

AUGUSTE-FRANÇOIS DE FRÉNILLY

IF FOR THÉROIGNE DE MéRICOURT the revolution was a sacred event, regenerative and transformative both publicly and privately, for Thérésia, marquise de Fontenay, seventeen years old and three years married, it was just the new backdrop to her normal life. Instead of attending dull court parties in stiff tight-laced dresses, she wore frilled chemises to picnics in the woods; otherwise, eighteen months after the Bastille had fallen, not much seemed different. ‘The tranquillity of France is but little disturbed, notwithstanding the wonderful changes that have of late happened,’ Lady Sutherland, the English ambassadress, wrote home in January 1791, complaining that Paris had grown very dull.

Thérésia de Fontenay moved in the same worldly circles as Lady Sutherland and Germaine de Staël. Her father François Cabarrus was a successful Basque banker at the Spanish court, who in 1782 had founded the state bank, the Banco San Carlos. Thérésia had been brought up in rural Spain before joining her mother in Paris and attending, as girls of her class did, an exclusive Parisian convent. When she was fourteen she was married to twenty-six-year-old Jean-Jacques Devin de Fontenay who came from a family of recently ennobled merchants. Like Germaine Necker's marriage to Éric Magnus de Staël, Mlle Cabarrus's match with Fontenay was arranged—a union of new money with, in this case, new aristocracy. Thérésia's dowry included a substantial chunk of Parisian real estate, but the young couple lived in the Fontenay hôtel on the Île Saint-Louis.

Thérésia was married for the first time, according to her daughter long afterwards, ‘sans joie comme sans chagrin’. ‘Her good and tender soul’ would have grown attached to her husband's, lamented Mme du Narbonne-Pelet, but for his ‘revolting behaviour, inconstancy and profound immorality’. Her parents, ambitious but inexperienced in Parisian ways, and according to Thérésia's later descriptions of her childhood, neglectful, seem to have found Fontenay's personal unsuitability for marriage less important than his title. He was a gambler and a roué, utterly debauched, who kept a mistress and travelled with a guidebook containing details ‘of all the filles de joie to be found on the road’. Thérésia, still a child, was ‘prostituted’ to an infamous rake.

This, of course, was the way of the pre-revolutionary haut monde; all that was unusual was the degree of Fontenay's dissipation, and the fact that his mistress was a lowly shop-girl rather than an actress or a friend's wife. The same society that reviled the lonely, idealistic Théroigne de Méricourt as a prostitute sold the young Thérésia de Fontenay into an unhappy marriage and expected her to console herself with lovers.

In Letters to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, written two years after her own marriage, Germaine de Staël lamented the hypocrisy that brought up young girls in the closest seclusion only to marry them off to men who had no intention of forming an emotional attachment to them, thrusting them unprepared into a world where everything they had been taught to value was denigrated. ‘Even the men, with their bizarre principles, wait until a woman is married before they speak to her of love,’ she observed. ‘At that point, everything changes: people no longer seek to exalt their minds with romantic notions but to soil their hearts with cold jests on everything they have been taught to respect.’ Custom only legitimized these practices. ‘What social disaster for a husband to consider himself invited to a house simply because his wife was invited!’ remembered Lucy de la Tour du Pin of the habits of her prerevolutionary life. Corruption had become natural. ‘Virtue in men and good conduct in women became the object of ridicule and were considered provincial.’

Many husbands encouraged their brides to take lovers, aware that if their wives were busy elsewhere their own activities would escape attention. Accomplished libertines were masters of amorality. ‘There is nothing in love but the flesh,’ held the naturalist Buffon, and Rousseau's Confessions substantiate the ancien régime's institutionalized cynicism. His independent, older mistress, Mme de Warens, was taught by her first lover that the moral importance of marital fidelity lay only in its effect on public opinion. According to this argument, ‘adultery in itself was nothing, and was only called into existence by scandal…every woman who appeared virtuous by that mere fact became so’.

Perhaps because her husband was so unlovable, Thérésia made little effort even to appear virtuous. Although she produced a son, Théodore, in May 1789, she was more interested in social than domestic life and quickly became part of the louche, liberal circuit of Germaine de Staël and her friends. By the summer of 1790, in an aptly revolutionary analogy, Thérésia was said to have ‘dethroned’ the ‘delicious’ blonde Nathalie de Noailles as the most beautiful woman in Paris.

Thérésia's dark loveliness and foreign riches made her a celebrity. Raven-haired, with flashing eyes, she was much in the mould of Germaine de Staël, ‘but extremely en beau’. Mme de la Tour du Pin compared her to the goddess Diana—though no doubt in her aspect as huntress rather than virgin—enthusing that ‘no more beautiful creature had ever come from the hands of the Creator’. Thérésia's statuesque looks were enhanced by ‘matchless grace’, ‘radiant femininity’ and a peculiarly charming voice ‘of caressing magic’, husky, melodious and slightly accented.

She was self-centred, but generous and passionate, taking delight in pleasing others as much as herself. The secularism of the early days of the revolution, its philosophical and political exaltation of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, had loosened private moral strictures; high-spirited Thérésia enjoyed these new freedoms to the full. The personal philosophy she would develop combined the worldliness and sexual licence enjoyed by married noblewomen before the revolution with the secular amorality of the new republic. Pleasure was her only responsibility, and Thérésia was as happy to find it in 1791 at revolutionary fêtes as she had been at royal receptions in 1788. Although she was not at first personally transformed by the revolution in the way that her friend Germaine, or Théroigne de Méricourt, were, Thérésia's entire adult existence was coloured by the revolution and its upheavals. Fifteen years old in 1789, she knew nothing but change. The great lessons of her youth were opportunism and adaptability.

Thérésia's whirl of parties and gossip continued, but imperceptibly every aspect of daily life, private as well as public, assumed political overtones. ‘When they converse, liberty is the theme of discourse; when they dance, the figure of the cotillion is adapted to a national tune; and when they sing, it is but to repeat a vow of fidelity to the constitution.’ Even the slang reflected the changing times, according to Helen Maria Williams. ‘Everything tiresome or unpleasant, “c'est une aristocracie!” [sic] and everything charming and agreeable is, “à la nation”.’ Jean-Jacques Devin de Fontenay may have been debauched, but he was sufficiently fashionable to keep up with politics, attending meetings at the Jacobin Club in December 1790.

Since it was stylish for women to take an interest in politics too, it is likely that Thérésia attended the National Assembly's opening session in Paris, after the women's march to Versailles, in the late autumn of 1789. Théroigne de Méricourt must have been present, taking the place in the tribunes of the manège that she had claimed as her own in Versailles; Germaine de Staël was sitting in the front row of the women's galleries; nearby was Rose de Beauharnais, wife of a progressive aristocratic deputy and the future Empress Joséphine, and Félicité de Genlis, mistress of the liberal duc d'Orléans and governess to his children, one of whom, the future King Louis-Philippe, sat beside her.

The Assembly's meetings were chaotic. Every deputy seemed ‘more inclined to talk than to listen’, recorded Helen Williams, but that did not stop women of all classes crowding the galleries at every session. Rosalie Jullien, wife of one of the deputies, went so regularly that she only mentioned not attending the Assembly in her letters. English visitors like Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Berry rushed to request tickets when they arrived in Paris. Lucy de la Tour du Pin said her sister-in-law, the former marquise de Lameth, watched the Assembly's sessions every day.

Thérésia attended meetings of the Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes, branches of which counted among its members Théroigne and Pauline Léon. She also became a sister at the Olympic Lodge of freemasons, following in her friend Lafayette's footsteps, and was a member of the liberal Club of 1789 whose patron was the duc d'Orléans. Like other women of her background, Thérésia probably observed the early proceedings of the Jacobins many of whom, in 1790 and early 1791, were her friends.

A list of putative members of a 1790 Club of the Rights of Man* numbered not Thérésia herself but several of her most intimate friends, and demonstrates the milieu in which she lived. Members were said to have included Thérésia's best friend from convent days, Mme Charles de Lameth, and her husband; his brother Alexandre, close to both Thérésia and Germaine de Staël; Mathieu de Montmorency, also linked to Germaine; and the brilliant, lecherous comte de Mirabeau, with whom Thérésia toured the ruins of the Bastille.

True salonnières like Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis had little time for popular societies. Their interest in politics was strictly personal and entirely exclusive. Genlis went just once to watch the Jacobins, and thought the more radical Cordeliers' Club, because ‘women of the lower orders spoke in it’, was ‘a sight at once striking, shocking and ridiculous’. The young chocolate-maker Pauline Léon was a regular attendant of the Cordeliers' sessions; she was exactly the kind of loud-mouthed working woman who would have offended Genlis's elitist sensibilities. The political involvement of the lower classes of either sex worried Germaine de Staël, whose steady advocacy of a constitutional monarchy became less and less radical as the goalposts shifted past her. ‘The Revolution naturally descended lower and lower each time that the upper classes allowed the reins to slip from their hands, whether by want of wisdom or their want of address,’ she lamented.

In the summer of 1789 Thérésia held a dinner at the Fontenay château in Fontenay-aux-Roses just outside Paris. The theme and decorations were inspired by the Rousseauesque pastoral ideals of simplicity and nature so valued by liberals. Girls dressed in white handed guests bunches of flowers as they arrived, ‘comme dans une pastorale antique’; they dined on the grass beneath spreading chestnut trees, ‘comme en Arcadie’. Thérésia was toasted not as queen but as goddess of the fête. Her guests, she remembered later, were the progressive aristocrats of her circle, like Mirabeau, as well as a sprinkling of political radicals including Camille Desmoulins and his old schoolfriend Maximilien Robespierre; she lacked the elitist scruples of Mme de Staël. ‘That day was the true celebration of my youth,’ Thérésia recalled, years later. ‘They did not yet call me Notre Dame de Thermidor, but nor did the cowards call me Notre Dame de Septembre: I was simply Notre Dame de Fontenay.’

These pastoral idylls were a fashionable way for the liberal elite to demonstrate their virtuous sentimentality and their solidarity with the ‘people’. In the 1780s, when the celebrated lawyer Guy-Jean Target had won back for the villagers of Salency in Picardy the right to choose their own rosière, or annual rose queen (instead of their lord, who claimed the right for himself), Félicité de Genlis had gone to Salency to play the harp at their fête. The song based on that popular victory, ‘La Rosière de Salency’, was played at Thérésia's own fête champêtre.

The following summer, a similar festival was held to celebrate the anniversary of the so-called Tennis Court Oath. The deputies of the National Assembly processed to Versailles bearing the oath of allegiance inscribed on a bronze tablet alongside stones from the fallen Bastille. They renewed their oaths in the palace's tennis court, then returned to Paris, stopping in the Bois de Boulogne for a feast held under the trees at which they were attended by women dressed as shepherdesses. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was read as grace. Georges Danton, crowned like the rest of the deputies with an oak-leaf wreath, proposed a toast to the liberty and happiness of the entire world. In one of the elaborately symbolic set-pieces so beloved of the revolutionaries, a model of the Bastille was set on the table and smashed, hopefully with great care, since revealed inside lay a real baby swaddled in white, representing oppressed innocence liberated by the revolution. A red Phrygian cap, modelled on those given to Roman slaves when they were freed, was placed on its head.

In Paris, meanwhile, rapturous preparations for the anniversary of the Bastille's fall were under way, as men and women of all ages and classes, ‘inspired by the same spirit’, helped turn the Champs de Mars into a vast amphitheatre. Even the king took his turn with a spade. The worksite became the backdrop for scenes of revolutionary virtue and brotherhood as Parisians competed with one another to contribute to the cause of freedom and the patrie. Women and men saw themselves as equal contributors to the effort: ‘I honour no less that multitude of citizens and citizenesses who do not think that they have consecrated those works by their hands but their hands by those works,’ wrote Camille Desmoulins. The atmosphere was fervently emotional. It would have been impossible, wrote Louis-Sebastien Mercier, to have beheld the scene without being moved.

Women of gentle birth were eager to be a part of Federation Day. ‘Ladies took the instruments of labour in their hands, and removed a little of the earth,’ wrote Helen Williams, ‘that they might be able to say that they had assisted in the preparations.’ Pauline de Laval—beloved by Thérésia's and Germaine's friend Mathieu de Montmorency—caught pneumonia after spending the whole night before the celebrations helping cart dirt on the Champs de Mars, and died a few days later, ‘victim to an excess of patriotic zeal’.

Their unpowdered hair falling loosely on to their shoulders, wearing blue military-style jackets with red collars and cuffs based on National Guard uniforms, or straw bonnets and white muslin dresses trimmed with tricolour ribbons and sashes, or riding-habits à la Théroigne—all as expressions of their modish political sympathies—fashionable ladies like Thérésia de Fontenay brought drinks to the men toiling at the Champs de Mars. Even the colours of their clothes echoed the mood of the times: a shade of red known as ‘Foulon's blood’ was named after an unpopular minister killed in the aftermath of the Bastille's fall.

On 14 July the statue of the king most admired by the revolutionaries, Henri IV, sported a tricolour scarf. Priests and National Guardsmen in their bright new uniforms of red, white and blue danced in the streets with white-clad girls. Lamps hung in the trees lining the Champs-Élysées, the palace of the Louvre was illuminated and the site of the Bastille had been turned into a park. Representatives from the newly created French regional departments processed beside the deputies of the National Assembly, the National Guard and the king and queen. Talleyrand celebrated mass on the monumental Altar of the Fatherland while Lafayette administered the oath to the people, who, right arms upheld, swore ‘to be faithful forever to the nation, the law and the king’. Fireworks fizzled in the pouring rain, and the hundreds of thousands of patriotic onlookers cried, ‘The French revolution is cemented with water, instead of blood!’ ‘What is it to me if I'm wet,’ sang the poissardes, ‘for the cause of liberty?’ As one historian comments on the ecstatic mood of the day, ‘no fatal gap had yet opened up between principles and reality’. Only the queen could not hide her ill-humour.

The air of celebration permeated the nation. ‘This memorable day was like an experiment in electricity,’ wrote Mercier. ‘Everything which touched the chain partook of the shock’. Helen Williams thought it ‘the most sublime spectacle’ ever witnessed, while her countryman William Wordsworth, landing in Calais on Federation Day, was struck by how ‘individual joy embodied national joy’. Everywhere, ‘benevolence and blessedness spread like a fragrance’.

Although Parisian women had been refused permission by the Constitution Committee to take part in the main ceremony—they were permitted instead to organize a tableau representing the confederation being offered to St Genevieve—across the country women celebrated alongside the men. In Beaufort-en-Vallée, eighty-three women disappeared during the ceremony and returned, as a surprise, in costumes representing the eighty-three departments; the women of Dénezé-sous-le-Lude received the municipality's reluctant consent to hold their own Federation Day celebrations. As an expression of the benevolent atmosphere of the day in Angers, ‘each of the municipal officers insisted on taking the arm of one of those women that are called women of the people’.

Motivated by the same spirit that led fine ladies to pick up shovels for the first time in their lives, donating one's jewels to the caisse patriotique became far more chic than wearing them. Félicité de Genlis had the ultimate revolutionary accessory: a polished shard of the fallen Bastille made into a brooch. Her stone was set in a wreath of emerald laurel leaves tied at the top in a jewelled tricolour rosette, and inlaid with the word Liberté in diamonds.

‘Every man seems at pains to show that he has wasted as few moments as possible at his toilette,’ wrote Helen Williams, commenting on the trend for negligence in dress, ‘and that his mind is bent on higher cares than the embellishment of his person.’ There was an element of fancy dress in all this artful simplicity that characterized every stage of the revolution except the darkest moments of the Terror. It was almost as if people were trying on new identities with each change of their political faith, or struggling to define themselves through their appearance when everything around them was shifting and uncertain. Talma's classical costume for his role in Voltaire's Brutus, combined with the early revolutionaries' hero-worship of the Greeks and Romans, made a craze of antiquity. ‘We were transformed into Spartans and Romans,’ remembered the actress Louise Fusil. Helen Williams even took lessons in Roman history from a private tutor. When Brutus was performed, with its noble revolutionary theme of a father sacrificing his sons to save the Roman republic, the subject was considered so incendiary that weapons were banned from the theatre and extra police forces were marshalled in case of trouble.

David's monumental history painting, The Lictors Bringing Back to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons, had been shown for the first time at the Salon of August 1789. Louis XVI, David's patron, had requested for the exhibition a painting of Coriolanus, the fifth-century Roman leader who had safeguarded the rights of the aristocracy over the people. When David defied him by submitting the Brutus painting instead, at first the king banned it, but then submitted to public pressure. Art students wearing the uniform of the newly created National Guard watched over it in the gallery. It caused a sensation: as the newspaper Père Duchesne observed, David's paintings ‘had inflamed more souls for liberty than the best books’.

In the background of David's drawing of the Tennis Court Oath, exhibited in the Salon of 1791, a bolt of lightning—symbol of liberty—strikes the Chapel-Royal at Versailles. Félicité de Genlis's response to this sketch demonstrated the underlying conservatism of her liberal views. She challenged him about it, arguing that it seemed to show ‘the destruction of the royal family’; he responded that it was meant to indicate merely ‘the destruction of despotism’. They never spoke again.

Helen Williams later commented on the hypocrisy of nobles like Félicité de Genlis, who claimed to be revolutionaries, but who despite their genuine enthusiasm for change never betrayed their class. ‘I have found out that an aristocrate always begins a political conversation assuring you he is not one—that no one wished more sincerely than him for reform,’ she wrote in 1794. They would continue, she said, by protesting, ‘But to take away the King's power, to deprive the clergy of their revenues, is pushing things to an extremity, at which every honest mind shudders. If the National Assembly had made a reform without injuring these orders of the State, they would have been applauded by the world.’

Thérésia would have frequented Mme de Genlis's Thursday salon at Bellechasse in Saint-Germain as well as Germaine de Staël's salon in the nearby rue du Bac. There was no love lost between the two hostesses although their politics were similar and their circles of friends overlapped. Genlis, twenty years older than Germaine, had known her since childhood and thought her ill-bred and ‘altogether a most embarrassing person’. Like Germaine, Félicité was well known for her intelligence and what Talleyrand called her ‘career of gallantries’; Thérésia cited both their names when she later bemoaned the loss of her virtue in the drawing-rooms of the capital. Whereas Germaine was unrepentant about her passion for Narbonne, Félicité affected ‘the height of prudery’. ‘To avoid the scandal of coquetry,’ continued Talleyrand, she ‘always yielded easily to powerful, useful men’, the latest and longest-lasting of whom was the king's liberal cousin, the duc d'Orléans.

‘Though her eyes and smile were fine,’ said Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who thought Genlis a spellbinding conversationalist, ‘I do not think her face would have adapted easily to the expression of kindness.’ Genlis's ten volumes of memoirs bear out Vigée-Lebrun's conclusion. A typical anecdote begins, ‘One praise I may venture to give myself, because I am quite sure I deserve it…’ Félicité presents herself as an unrivalled beauty (everybody else's looks are judged and found wanting), a celebrated authoress, a gifted musician, a talented rider (‘I was thought to look so well on horseback’), a skilled nurse who can let blood and set wounds ‘to perfection’, and an expert on education. She seems unaware of her lack of generosity or humour.

Those who attended Félicité's salon in Saint-Germain and her lover's dinners at the Palais Royal were as influenced by England and America as were Germaine's friends in the rue du Bac, but their tone, as Evangeline Bruce points out, was derived less from Rousseau than from Choderlos de Laclos, author of the cynical masterpiece Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the duc d'Orléans's best friend. Orléans himself, charming, lighthearted and vain, ‘corrupted everything within his reach’. He flattered himself as a liberal patriot, selling paintings to feed the poor in the harsh winter of 1788 and opening the Palais Royal in the spring of 1789 for a night of carousing to celebrate the release of members of the garde française who had been imprisoned for refusing to fire on their fellow-citizens, but he was not at all unhappy to be increasingly often suggested as a constitutional replacement for his absolute cousin Louis on France's throne.

Orléans was quick to relinquish his title in 1790, choosing instead the shamelessly populist name of Philippe Égalité, and reducing his establishment at the Palais Royal in order to demonstrate his modesty and attachment to reform. Félicité began calling herself Citoyenne Brûlart (one of her family names), embracing, like Thérésia, yet another of the fashionable trappings of the revolution. She made more of an effort than Germaine de Staël to cultivate the young radicals of the National Assembly, including Théroigne's friend the future mayor of Paris, Jérôme Pétion, for whom she ‘had a real esteem’, and another progressive deputy, Bertrand Barère, who admired her writing and sent her his own pamphlets. She was seen at a ball in Paris at this time with boldly unpowdered hair, wearing a dress of red, white and blue, dancing wildly to the revolutionary anthem ‘ça Ira’.

This stirring song, dating to the summer of 1790, would accompany the revolution through all its incarnations—later with lyrics calling for the stringing up of all aristocrats. For the moment, its words celebrated the revolution's victories and aims: despite the traitors, the people would triumph; aristocrats and priests regretted their mistakes; the enemies of the state were confounded; equality, liberty and patriotism would prevail. It was a dangerous tune for a woman in Félicité de Genlis's position to sing.

Although Mary Berry, visiting Paris from London in 1790 for the first time in five years, found it neglected and empty, with carts instead of carriages filling the streets, for Thérésia, Félicité and their friends the social seasons of 1790–1 and 1791–2 were particularly glittering. Paris ‘had never been so brilliant. One might have thought that people were accumulating joy to last them all the time they were about to sorrow,’ wrote the marquis de Frénilly afterwards. ‘There was something prophetic in this surfeit of pleasures. We had the art of amusing ourselves out of foresight, like people who lay in a supply of food against famine.’

This frenetic aristocratic hedonism took place against a backdrop of increasing popular menace, directed as much against women as men. Mary Berry was surprised and shaken in the spring of 1791 to find a group of six or seven poissardes, market women, demanding entrance to her room, ostensibly to give her a bouquet but in fact to demand money of her. She gave them six francs, ‘which they desired to have doubled’, and one insisted on embracing her. Afterwards she discovered that her experience was fairly common. Travellers, who the women knew would have ready money on them, were frequent targets, although even the king's brother had been accosted in this way. ‘It seems these ladies now make a practice of going about where or to whom they please…and neither porters nor servants dare to stop them.’

At about the same time a large band of men, some in women's clothes, invaded the convents of Paris, many of which had ties to aristocratic families, stripping and beating nuns of all ages and running them out of their sanctuaries in a brutal rite of humiliation. Even the anticlerical Manon Roland would later lament the fate of her friend Agatha, a nun expelled from her convent in 1791, suffering on her wretched pension ‘when age and ill health make that asylum [the convent] more necessary than ever for her’.

Many royalist aristocrats, marginalized by their views and fearing for their safety, simply left France. After the Bastille fell in 1789, ‘emigration became all the vogue’: people raised money from their estates to take with them; many even welcomed the chance to travel. As Germaine de Staël said, emigration was ‘an act of party’, a statement of aristocratic honour and loyalty to the royal family rather than (at this stage) a flight from active persecution. Elderly men who had retired to their country houses received small parcels containing white feathers, emblems of cowardice, as reproaches for sanctioning the revolution by remaining behind.

Although she respected the émigrés' attachment to the king, in hindsight Germaine was horrified by their desertion of their country. In politics, as in morals, she later wrote, there are certain responsibilities one must never abjure, the first of which is that one must never abandon one's nation to foreigners. She thought the nobility's desertion of France—seeing their country as ‘as a jealous lover wishes his mistress—dead or faithful’—gave the masses more reason to hate aristocrats, as well as demonstrating how unnecessary they were to the running of society.

The pace of change accelerated as 1791 progressed. Germaine, alarmed on the one hand by the increasing radicalization of the Assembly and on the other by the continued resistance of the king and his party to change, published an article called How Can We Determine What Is the Opinion of the Majority of the Nation?, in which she called for moderation, a balance between liberty and order. The central position, she argued, would be ‘stronger, more distinct and more vigorous than the two opposed extremes’. Her efforts were in vain: a poem satirizing her attempts to reconcile all the parties showed her receiving royalists and Jacobins at intervals through the day, ‘and at night, everybody’. In both Jacobin and royalist newspapers she was called a ‘nouvelle Circe’, and her husband was depicted as a foolish cuckold. A play entitled The Intrigues of Mme de Staël appeared, in which she was shown as a nymphomaniac stirring up riots to help advance her lovers' careers.

Despite her desire for a constitution, Germaine was sympathetic to the monarchy and hoped to preserve it. In February 1791, her lover Louis de Narbonne accompanied the king's two aunts, Mmes Adélaïde and Victoire (and perhaps his own great-aunts), to exile in Rome. The king and queen never trusted Germaine. Her radical reputation had stuck, although she was in 1791, by comparison with the Jacobins, a political moderate. Gouverneur Morris shared a mistress with Talleyrand, the intimate friend of Germaine and her lover Narbonne; Morris reported what he learned about Germaine's set from Adèle to his friends in the king's party. In the summer of 1791 Morris was placing royalist spies in the Jacobin Club and urging the king to stand firm against the revolutionaries.

Almost inadvertently, as a member of the set which included intriguers like Germaine and Morris, the young marquise de Fontenay became politicized. Even a girl with a life as defiantly superficial as hers could not remain immune to the chaos swirling around her. Thérésia's close friends and lovers were all passionately involved in politics. Her name was linked to all three of the liberal Lameth brothers, whose shared passion for her was said to have prevented any one of them seeking to make her his own. But her great love from this period was the more radical Félix Lepeletier, with whom she started an affair in 1789, when she was fifteen.

In April 1791 Thérésia's name appeared for the first time in the counterrevolutionary press. As with other women in the public eye, such as Théroigne de Méricourt, Germaine de Staël and Marie-Antoinette, her ‘corrupt’ private life was associated with the political corruption of her supposed lovers. Thérésia apparently took the unusual step of writing directly to the Journal de la Cour et de la Ville professing her patriotism and denying their claims that she was ‘a little too much’ involved with the brothers Lameth and Condorcet, among others. The letter was probably a fake, intended to compromise her still further, but it is marked by the naïve faith in others' good nature that always characterized Thérésia's behaviour.

Thérésia and her friend Mme Charles de Lameth—since school-days nicknamed Dondon because of her precocious bosom—became regular features of the royalist gossip sheets. The Chronique Scandaleuse presented Thérésia in the autumn of 1791 as a worshipper of Priapus, ‘the other god’, each week entertaining eight lovers, including such unlikely candidates as Robespierre and Mirabeau, who had died suddenly earlier that year. ‘How could I resist his eloquence?’ she asks. But although these alliances were fabricated, one young radical had indeed caught the beautiful former marquise's eye.

Jean-Lambert Tallien was born in Paris in 1767, the son of the marquis de Bercy's butler. Bercy—who some believed was the boy's father—had paid for his education, and Tallien worked initially as a secretary to the Bercy family. In 1790, aged twenty-three, he was tutoring his own cousins, daughters of a Paris merchant. This job left Tallien plenty of time to pursue his revolutionary interests: he was a National Guardsman; his name was on the first known list of Jacobin Club members in December 1790; he attended sessions of the Cordeliers' Club, across the Seine near the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Tallien founded a branch of the Fraternal Society which met at the former convent of the Minimes in the Place Royal (now the Place des Vosges) near his home in the Marais; this was the division of the Fraternal Society attended by Pauline Léon. On his twenty-fourth birthday, 23 January 1791, he addressed the Society on the historical causes of the revolution.

Two months later, Alexandre de Lameth hired Tallien as his secretary. One day soon afterwards, Tallien, looking for Alexandre, was admitted to the house of his brother Charles, husband of Thérésia's girlhood friend. Alexandre was not there, but Dondon de Lameth asked Tallien to go out into the garden to cut some white roses for Mme de Fontenay. Tallien, tall and blond, offered them with a flourish to Thérésia; a single flower fell from the bouquet and Tallien selfconsciously kept it rather than putting it back with the others. As he left, Thérésia turned to Dondon and demanded to hear all she knew about Tallien. She replied that he was witty and lazy and ran after girls, but for all that he was the best secretary in the world and was rapidly making himself indispensable to Alexandre. Thérésia's interest was piqued.

An unverifiable anecdote suggests that this may have been their second encounter. Apparently, while Thérésia was having her portrait painted by Vigée-Lebrun before the painter left Paris in 1789, Tallien arrived at the studio; he was working for a printer at the time and looking for the journalist Antoine Rivarol, one of Vigée-Lebrun's guests. A small group was standing around the portrait debating how well it had captured its sitter's beauty. Vigée-Lebrun, fed up with their comments, turned to the young messenger and asked him what he thought of it. Tallien examined the painting and, provocatively slowly, the model herself. Eventually he delivered his critique: Vigée-Lebrun had made the eyes a little too small and the mouth a little too big, but she had almost captured Thérésia's expression and character, and the play of light reminded him of Velázquez. He bowed and withdrew. It is a romantic story, as so many stories about Thérésia are, particularly the ones she told herself—one of her early-twentieth-century biographers called her penchant for embroidering her life story her ‘curieuse mythomanie’*—but no painting of Thérésia by Vigée-Lebrun survives and in her memoirs she describes meeting Thérésia for the first time in 1801, with no mention of this incident.

Regardless of when they first laid eyes on each other, in 1791 Tallien the ambitious messenger-boy and Thérésia the former marquise still inhabited worlds so far apart that there was no possibility of their coming together on equal ground. All that would have changed by the time they met again.

* Her French accusers said Théroigne de Méricourt had boasted of forming this club.

*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.