Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (12 page)

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 want
ing), 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 Adéle 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 self-consciously 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.