Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

by Moore, Lucy

Cultured, exclusive courtesans in the tradition of Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry had returned to high society; indeed many saw Thérésia herself as no more than a high-class prostitute. She played on these assumptions, dressing for parties as Aspasia, the Greek courtesan who became Pericles’ consort. Barras also compared his mistress to the hetaerae of ancient Greece. When he saw Thérésia and Talleyrand tête-à-tête at the Luxembourg, he called her his ‘beautiful Athenian’ and asked her if she wanted to govern like a second Aspasia.

  Such comparisons were not always complimentary. A pamphlet addressed ‘to the greatest whore in Paris’ reviled Thérésia for her ‘revolting’ voluptuousness, her impudence and her decadence. ‘Your whims and your tastes are more closely observed than the decrees of the government,’ stormed the anonymous author, who signed himself Beelzebub, demanding to know who paid for her jewels and accusing her of corrupting innocent young men. The prostitutes on the streets were angels compared to her, he continued, and Thérésia set them their example. Lower-class whores flooded Paris’s streets in the late 1790s. They teemed beneath the arcades of the Palais Royal among the ice-sellers, pickpockets and lottery-ticket vendors–looking like cheap versions of Thérésia and her friends with their ‘breasts uncovered, heads tossing, colour high on their cheeks, and eyes as bold as their hands’–whispering obscenities to male passers-by.

  The prostitutes interrogated by the police were on average in their early twenties and came mostly from the provinces. They had had no one to fall back on in Paris when they lost their position in a household or were left pregnant by a lover who failed to marry them as he had promised. Driven on to the streets because they could not afford to buy food or had a baby to feed, they lived desperate, itinerant lives, sleeping where they could find a bed, stealing handkerchiefs or a loaf of bread if an opportunity arose, and always hungry. Their experiences underlined the vulnerability of women in revolutionary France and the hazards and insecurity facing them in a society that valued them so little.

  It was these frightened, lonely young women who drove up the suicide rates. Richard Cobb gives the example of Louise-Émilie-Charlotte Harmond, aged fourteen, whose body was fished out of the Seine at Sévres in July 1799. The description of the clothes she was wearing when she died survives in poignant detail: the embroidered muslin dress over a toile slip stitched with her initials, a pair of dirty cotton stockings and shoes, a scarf of blue and white striped silk around her neck, and a tiny piece of soap wrapped in chiffon.

  All through the spring and summer of 1797, émigrés streamed back into Paris and the royalists mustered their strength. Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her husband came back from their farm in the United States hoping to recover some of their lost fortune. One new way of making money was surprising and unwelcome to her: when she landed in France Lucy sent for a hairdresser, who astonished her by offering her 200 francs for her long fair hair. The blond wigs popularized by Thérésia were still the height of fashion.

  One of Lucy’s first calls was to La Chaumière to thank Thérésia, to whom she owed her escape from Bordeaux. Thérésia, who was just pregnant (probably with Barras’s child), wept as she told Lucy how unhappy she was with Tallien, describing what she called his unreasonable suspicions, the speed with which he took offence and how he threatened to kill her when he was jealous. The scenes she had enjoyed provoking in Bordeaux had acquired a dark new import; on one occasion, when she arrived home late after a party, she had been forced to flee the house as he loaded his pistol. That March, she had instituted divorce proceedings against him on the grounds of irreconcilable differences but, persuaded out of it by her friends and hoping they might still make peace, she abandoned them soon afterwards.

  Other observers confirm that Thérésia was, during this period, trying in vain to justify why she had felt obliged to marry Tallien in the first place, saying that she had never loved him but had sacrificed herself ‘to his wishes in order to spare the blood of many who were likely to be victims of the then established tyranny’. As Lucy was leaving La Chaumiére, Tallien arrived. Frostily, she thanked him for the favour he had performed for her in Bordeaux and he replied that she could always count on him.

  The elections had brought a majority of moderate royalists into the two houses of the Directory in April 1797, and only the Directors themselves (three of the five, Barras, Louis La Révellière and Jean-François Reubell, were committed republicans) stood between them and control of a France longing for a new regime of peace and stability. Lucy was amazed to see how indiscreetly confident her former friends were, loudly discussing their hopes and plans in front of servants and republican deputies. When she told them she was sure Talleyrand knew of every plot they were hatching, they laughed at her. Nearly every day she saw Germaine, whom she described at this time as ‘all powerful’.

  Over the summer Barras, supported by his two fellow-Directors, Talleyrand, the republican deputies and the army, decided that military action was the only means by which he could safeguard the Republic and his own power. In early September, as the streets filled with soldiers and the air of crisis intensified, Barras advised Thérésia, who was seven months pregnant with his child, to leave Paris for a few days. On the night of 3 September, Barras dined with Talleyrand, Germaine and Benjamin Constant, while outside the army, commanded by one of Napoléon’s officers, peacefully occupied the city. Paris awoke the next day (18 Fructidor Year V) to discover its walls plastered with justifications of the coup and the news that anyone wishing to restore the monarchy or the 1793 constitution would be shot without trial.

  About midday Lucy de la Tour du Pin and a friend, dressed inconspicuously, set out through streets full of soldiers to call on Germaine and find out what was happening. They were forced to take a circuitous route, as so many roads were blocked, and as they walked they were terrified by a ‘number of those horrible women who appear only during revolutions or disorders, [and who] began insulting us, shouting “Down with the royalists”’. Much shaken, they arrived at the rue du Bac to find Germaine and Constant arguing about the inevitability of the coup and its possible repercussions.

  Germaine’s fears about the consequences of the coup were realized the following day when Barras and the Directors re-established their control over the dispirited and passive deputies. Prominent royalists were deported; press censorship was reimposed; the spring elections were proclaimed invalid; and, on pain of death, refractory priests and returned émigrés were ordered to leave Paris within twenty-four hours and France within a week. The Republic’s triumph had come at a price. Individual liberties and the principles of liberalism had been sacrificed, and Napoléon’s support for the coup had left the government dangerously in his debt. As Barras had predicted earlier in 1797, ‘we will all perish by the generals’.

  Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her family were once again trapped without passports in a France hostile to their cause. Her husband approached Talleyrand who, despite the fact that he had spent the day of the coup playing whist, was too preoccupied by his own future to help anyone else. Remembering his previous helpfulness, Lucy went to see Tallien, who drew up a statement outlining their circumstances and delivered it by hand to the Minister of Police, returning it with his signature and recommendation to her after several anxious hours and with a note apologizing for not having been able to do more. ‘The end of the letter,’ she wrote, ‘might have been construed to mean: “I wish you a good journey.”’

  Given the state of his marriage and the damage that helping royalists would have done to his shattered political career, it is surprising that Tallien was so ready once again to help his wife’s aristocratic friends, but he seldom refused an appeal to his heart. Victorine de Chastenay was another desperate young woman who asked for Tallien’s assurance after Fructidor and found him a gentle, obliging, trustworthy man–a far cry from the violent, gun-brandishing monster depicted by his unhappy wife or the self-serving hypocrite painted by his political enemies.

  After Fructidor, G
ermaine fell once again under official suspicion. Extremists of both sides portrayed her as an intriguer and a threat to political stability. Despite her republicanism, her closeness to Talleyrand and Barras and the fact that her salon had been at the centre of the government’s plans to crush the counterrevolution, she continued to make every effort to help and protect her royalist friends, calling it a woman’s duty to come to the aid of her friends whatever their opinions, and even enlisting Thérésia’s help in obtaining the release of Charles de Lacretelle and a friend of his. Talleyrand observed with his customary cynicism that Germaine enjoyed throwing people overboard simply to have the pleasure of fishing them out of the water again. Only Barras’s generous arguments on her behalf prevented her arrest.

  Fresh from his victorious campaign in Italy, three months after Fructidor Napoléon returned to Paris a conquering hero, clothed like a wolf in the guise of a man of peace and humility. He pretended to be prouder of honours such as his election to the newly created academic Institute of France than of his military triumphs. Affectedly republican, he made a point, at a time when using ‘Citoyen’ as a form of address had fallen into disuse, of continuing to address people thus. The general rejected the ostentatious fancy dress so beloved of the period, wearing austere, modest clothes, appearing on even the grandest of occasions in a plain grey greatcoat. His carriage, drawn by just two horses, was conspicuously unadorned.

  Germaine was as enthralled by Bonaparte as was the rest of France. She spoke the words on everyone’s lips when she told a friend in July that he was ‘the best republican in France, the most-freedom loving of Frenchmen’–the man who could save France from itself. His ‘tone of noble moderation’, she said, inspired confidence: ‘in those days, the warrior spoke like a judge, while the judges used the language of military violence’. Having received no reply to the letters of admiration with which she had already bombarded Napoléon, apparently urging him to discard his ‘insignificant’ wife in her favour, she begged Talleyrand to allow her to be present when her hero made his first official call at his ministry on 6 December.

  Still exhausted from his campaign and the journey back to Paris, a sallow Napoléon arrived at Talleyrand’s offices punctually at 11 o’clock. Germaine had been waiting there for an hour. For once, she was overwhelmed: the ‘confusion of admiration’ made her uncharacteristically speechless at first, and she found she had difficulty breathing when faced with those cold, marble eyes. But Napoléon ‘bestowed very little attention upon her’, as Talleyrand noted; he was more interested in meeting Talleyrand himself, to whose flattering letters he had been replying.

  Subsequent encounters did not lessen Napoléon’s fearsomeness. Germaine, admitting that he ‘constantly’ intimidated her, sensed he was impervious to her charms. ‘I had a confused feeling that no emotion of the heart’–by extension, Germaine herself, the embodiment of passion–‘could act upon him’. He was, she felt, ‘not like a creature of our species’: ‘his face expressed a sort of casual curiosity about all those human shapes he planned to bring into subjection as soon as he had the power to do so’.

  Still she persevered in the belief that he would one day recognize her worth, continuing to send him letters that he did not read and attempting to engage him in debate. One day, calling on him unannounced, she was told that the general was in the bath. To Napoléon’s horror, she tried to push her way upstairs, exclaiming, ‘Genius has no sex!’ Joséphine’s daughter Hortense said that Germaine pestered Napoléon so much during this period ‘that he did not, and perhaps could not, sufficiently try to hide his annoyance’.

  On 10 December a reception was held for Napoléon in the courtyard of the Luxembourg palace. When his distinctively simple carriage drew up, the crowds outside cried, ‘Vive la République!’ and ‘Vive Napoléon!’ Talleyrand introduced the victor of Austria and Italy to the audience of dignitaries gathered in the courtyard as the ‘son and hero of the Revolution…Far from fearing what some would call his ambition, I feel that the time will come perhaps when we must tear him away from his studious retreat.’ After Talleyrand’s hymn of praise, Napoléon allowed himself to be persuaded, with a great show of modesty, to speak a few terse words.

  Talleyrand also gave a magnificent, old-fashioned ball in Joséphine’s honour on 3 January that heralded the return to Parisian society of the spirit of the ancien régime. As at Versailles, only the ladies were seated at dinner; they were personally served by the male guests, who stood behind their chairs. The treasures Napoléon had looted in Italy were on prominent display. A daring, delicious new dance imported from Germany, the waltz, was danced in Paris for the first time that night.

  After dinner Germaine, undeterred as ever, accosted Napoléon and asked him which woman he loved most. ‘Madame, I love my own,’ he replied stiffly. But which did he most admire? she persisted. ‘The one best able to look after her household,’ he said. Well, who was the greatest woman in history? ‘The one, Madame, who has had the greatest number of children,’ he replied, turning on his heel and leaving her, taken aback, to gasp, ‘Extraordinary man!’ at the small crowd of onlookers who had gathered to gape at the encounter.

  It is unlikely that Thérésia attended Talleyrand’s ball because she had recently given birth to a stillborn baby, probably Barras’s, and had retreated at his suggestion to Grosbois to recuperate. An English visitor saw her at another party later in the month, looking, despite the pearls and diamonds in her hair, embattled, tired and preoccupied. Even republican wives disdained to visit her, he reported, and she was frequently exposed to unpleasant scenes and confrontations.

  Recognizing that the time was not yet ripe for a seizure of power, Napoléon kicked his heels in Paris in the early months of 1798. When Talleyrand suggested that he invade Egypt, cutting off British routes to India and establishing a base from which to harry them in the Mediterranean, he adopted the idea enthusiastically. Between them, in March, they convinced a reluctant Directory to approve their notion, and secret plans were put in place for the campaign. The ambitious expedition was to be funded by annexing Switzerland and its rich resources of gold. Germaine managed to get an appointment with Napoléon to try to dissuade him from invading, but as ever with him her impassioned appeals fell on deaf ears. He would only repeat to her that the Swiss–who had been the happy citizens of a thriving republic for centuries–needed ‘political rights’.

  Germaine returned to Coppet in time to be by her father’s side as they watched the French troops marching into Switzerland, listening to the army’s drums sounding out along the tranquil shores of Lake Geneva. By special order of the Directory, Necker was left undisturbed. For Germaine, the only positive consequence of the invasion was that Swiss citizens were automatically granted French citizenship. Against her better judgement, her dreams of officially belonging to France had finally been realized.

  Napoléon left France in May, mystery swirling around him like dust. Jean-Lambert Tallien followed a few weeks later. Tallien had lost his seat in the Council of Five Hundred and hoped, on foreign fields, to rebuild his career. The night before his departure, Victorine de Chastenay saw him at Barras’s, where he still came, she said, ‘with an appearance of friendship–but bitterness in his soul’. She had few hopes for her friend’s future; life in a camp ‘sans épaulettes’ would not be easy.

  Tallien wanted a fresh start. The six years he had spent in the service of his country, he told his mother before leaving, had brought him nothing but ingratitude. Intriguers and rogues were the only people who flourished in times such as theirs, but he would never be either. He assured her that he would find friends among Napoléon’s companions; he intended to establish himself in the world not only for his own sake but also for his children’s. Circumstances demanded this heartbreaking separation from all he held dear, he said, but he was resolved to bear it and return to the bosom of his family a changed man in two years’ time.

  As his letter to his mother showed, Tallien still hoped that he and T
hérésia had a future together. After the catastrophic French defeat by the British under Nelson at the battle of the Nile on 1 August, which he watched from the shore, Tallien wrote to his wife. He did not know, he said, whether she had yet received his previous four letters. Life in Egypt was hard, he told her: far from home, deprived of water, food and sleep, tormented by insects of all descriptions, of the forty thousand Frenchmen there were not four who did not wish themselves elsewhere. As for him, he wrote, although he had their little dog Minerve with him, he missed ‘notre charmante Chaumière’ twenty times a day. ‘Farewell, my good Thérésia, the tears drench my letter,’ he concluded. ‘The memories of your goodness, of your love, the hopes of finding you again still affectionate and faithful, of embracing my dear daughter, are the only things that sustain the unfortunate Tallien.’

  The letter never reached Thérésia; it was intercepted by the British fleet. The following spring she began an affair with the young banker Gabriel Ouvrard, who had made his fortune in paper and then in supplying the French army and navy. They had known each other since the first careless days at La Chaumiére. Barras stood aside with no ill-will, having them to stay at Grosbois together. In Feburary 1799, according to Thérésia, Ouvrard took her to a beautifully fitted house on the rue de Babylone and handed her the keys; she said that he had bought it for her because she had helped him so much in his work. In fact it was Barras who had paid for the house. Apparently unaware of his wife’s new domestic arrangements, Tallien would remain in Egypt for three years.

  He was away almost as long as Germaine, who stayed at Coppet with her father throughout the spring of 1798, to the delight of the republican press. ‘The baroness among baronesses, the pearl of her sex, the divinity of oligarchs, the favourite of the God of Constancy, the protectress of the émigrés, in a word, the universal woman has at last left France,’ hissed the journal Amis des Lois. ‘Hapless Frenchmen, you will not see her again.’