by Moore, Lucy
A week after the Festival, the Convention voted to replace the female figure of Liberty on the new Republic’s seal with a colossus representing the French people. Designed by Jacques-Louis David, this figure of a giant crushing federalism with a club succinctly expressed the two overriding concerns of the Montagnard Jacobins in the late autumn of 1793: destroying the federalism that threatened their control of the provinces, and removing women once and for all from the public sphere.
Manon Roland, who had appealed to Liberty at the moment of her death, would perhaps have seen in Liberty’s demotion the essence of the brutal injustices perpetrated by the regime that had destroyed her.
14
MAÎTRESSE
Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay
APRIL 1793–APRIL 1794
As for Thérésia, she is always an enchantress.
PIERRE-ÉTIENNE CABARRUS
AS THE TERROR INTENSIFIED in the late spring of 1793, Thérésia Cabarrus, former marquise de Fontenay, travelled south from Paris with her ex-husband, four-year-old son Théodore and three servants, heading for Bordeaux. Fontenay planned to leave France for Martinique, and the port of Bordeaux–not yet controlled by radical Jacobins–was his best hope for escape. Thérésia had no immediate plans to leave France. Her family, rich merchants, came from the south-west, so she was sure of a safe haven there. When they reached Bordeaux in early May, the newly divorced couple went their separate ways. At nineteen, for the first time in her life, Thérésia was free–her own woman, neither a daughter nor a wife.
Her brothers Domingo and Francisco and her uncles Dominique and Galabert were waiting to welcome her to Bordeaux, and a circle of admirers soon gathered at her shapely feet. Two young friends, Édouard de Colbert and Étienne de Lamothe, vied for Thérésia’s attentions, angrily stalked by her possessive brother Francisco. In the heat of the early summer, Thérésia, Francisco, her uncle Galabert and her two swains visited the spa-town of Bagnéres in the Pyrenees. On the way their rivalry spilled over into open antagonism. Lamothe, who had declared his love to Thérésia and been smiled upon, was challenged to a duel by the disappointed Colbert.
Lamothe described the coup d’épée he received at Colbert’s hands as a blessing, because it meant that Thérésia, touched by his gallantry, sent her brother, uncle and Colbert away and nursed him back to health. Lamothe later told a friend that he had never ‘met a woman so endowed with such power to seduce and arouse the sexual passions’. He was mad with lust, he said, and when Thérésia willingly surrendered to him he experienced unparalleled ecstasy. ‘Thérésia and I, happy as one is when one loves and one is free, spent the period of my convalescence in the most beautiful countryside, feeling ourselves in the bosom of a joy that has never in my life been equalled.’ Their pleasure may have been deeply felt, but it was also fleeting: when he had recovered, Lamothe rejoined his regiment of hussars in the revolutionary army and Thérésia returned to Bordeaux.
Thérésia, little Théodore, her man-servants William Bidos and Joseph and her lady’s-maid-cum-secretary, the pretty Frenelle, moved into a spacious apartment on the first floor of the Hôtel Franklin, overlooking the city’s public gardens. Its contents attested to its mistress’s accomplishments: a piano stood open by the flower-covered balcony, near a harp and a guitar lying on a sofa; books, pages of music and an abandoned piece of embroidery were scattered over the parquet-floored room; a half-sketched miniature leaned on an easel beside an ivory palette and a box of oil-paints. In her airy rooms, scented with orange-blossom, Thérésia was both artist and muse. Her languid, graceful presence made the horrors of the revolution seem far away.
But much of Bordeaux, capital of the Gironde region after which Manon Roland’s moderate friends had been named, openly opposed the radical regime in Paris. Virtual anarchy raged on the streets beneath Thérésia’s window. In August 1793, the National Convention appointed Jean-Lambert Tallien and Claude Ysabeau représentants en mission to Bordeaux, charged with bringing the area under central control. Although Ysabeau had arrived in Bordeaux in August, it was not until 16 October that the représentants made their formal entrance into the city, wearing their official blue redingotes, tricolour sashes and plumed hats, and accompanied by three battalions of infantry. Richard Cobb describes ‘the roving représentant’ coming into town ‘in a clatter of majesty, with the dust of an escort and to the sound of trumpets, that left the villager gaping and made the urban tailor anxious to be seen at the table of the great man’.
They made their headquarters at the former Grand Séminaire and erected a guillotine beneath their windows in the Place Nationale. Price maximums were imposed on foodstuffs so grocers refused to sell what goods they did have, bringing further hardship to an already hungry population; rationing was introduced, granting each adult a pound of meat and a pound of rough black bread (two pounds for breast-feeding mothers) a day. Every household was required to post by the door an official notice, on paper headed with the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death’ and edged with red, white and blue, listing the names of everyone who lived inside. People tried to make these forms as hard to read as possible–in pale ink, posted as high up as they could reach. Between October and December Tallien and Ysabeau condemned 126 opponents of the revolutionary regime, executing forty-two and acquitting a further forty-three.
Tallien had spent five months on mission in Tours in the spring and summer of 1793, where his energy, charm and organizational flair won him local approval and respect. Représentants, or ‘people’s representatives’, were as often homicidal monsters as reasonable administrators–the most notably power-crazed being Joseph Fouché and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois in Lyon–so for the inhabitants of Tours to consider Tallien the best of a bad lot was high praise. No ambitious republican could afford to avoid the militant language of the times, and Tallien was not immune to the muscle of phrases like ‘Bleed the purses and level the heads’; but when one Mercier du Rocher met Tallien in Tours in May he found him ‘severe and sweet at the same time’.
One of Tallien’s early reports back to Paris from the Gironde confirms Rocher’s observation. A few days before their official entry into the town, Tallien wrote that there was much work to be done there. ‘You think that Bordeaux is subject to the law,’ he wrote. ‘Well, you fool yourselves, none of the revolutionary laws decreed by the Convention are executed in Bordeaux.’ Enemies of the state were concealed throughout the population, he said. The letter concluded with a fond salutation–incongruous after his fighting words–‘Ysabeau et moi vous embrassons.’
Lucy de la Tour du Pin said that Thérésia and the dashing représentant met–or renewed their acquaintance, after exchanging glances in Paris–at a spa, probably Bagnéres, before Tallien arrived in Bordeaux in October. Since Tallien was in the Pyrenees in September this is highly likely, although Tour du Pin’s extra detail, that the smitten Thérésia followed Tallien to Bordeaux, is less probable because she was already established there. ‘He had rendered her some service or other which she repaid with an unbounded devotion she made no effort to conceal.’
The bond between the privileged young divorcée and the up-and-coming republican may have seemed strange to their contemporaries–their friends on both sides of the social divide found the match hard to comprehend–but, apart from the obvious chemistry between them, there were some significant points of contact, or gaps in one into which the other fitted. Both, in one way or another, were outsiders, longing for approval and recognition. Thérésia may have been rich, beautiful and well connected, but she was a foreigner and a parvenu. Even by eighteenth-century standards, she had been brought up without affection, shunted from place to place and used as a pawn by her ambitious parents.
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 cons
idered 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 infor
m 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.