Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (40 page)

Since Tallien was under investigation, the lovers did not dare to meet openly, although one spy reported seeing them dining together in a restaurant in the Palais Royal. Like so many at this time, Thérésia could not risk spending too many nights in one place, moving between the houses of friends willing to take the risk of harbouring her.

Paris in the spring of 1794 was a city of ‘silent streets and barricaded doors’. ‘Everyone seemed to slip through the shadows’; people wore their hats drawn down over their faces and dared give no sign of recognizing one another on the streets. ‘Women did not go out at all, men rarely,’ remembered the marquis de Frénilly. ‘The whole of
people’s lives was centred in their homes where they spoke little, in a low voice, and with the doors securely closed.’ Servants were encouraged to inform on their masters, children to inform on their teachers; no one could be trusted.

Blood literally flowed in the drains, and the city stank like a charnel-house. Dogs drank from the thick red pools beneath the scaffold in the Place de la Révolution, while alongside it hordes of listless prostitutes of all ages and both sexes grimly solicited custom. The executioners complained that they had to replace their clothes all the time because they were so stained and sodden with blood. One of the only concessions made by the Commune to the palpable fears of Parisians was to maintain the street lights at night.

Even–or perhaps especially–the deputies of the Convention were loath to walk the streets unprotected. Many carried pistols or sword-sticks, or paid guards to accompany them. Tallien had a Spanish dagger that Thérésia had given him. One night in June, according to one of the spies directly accountable to Robespierre, he walked home from the Jacobins with a man with a ‘heavy stick’. The spy, Guérin, complained that the street in which Tallien lived–the rue de la Perle in the Marais–was so straight and short that it was hard to keep watch on him; there was nowhere for an observer to conceal himself.

Robespierre too needed bodyguards. The president of the Committee of Public Safety, Marc Guillaume Vadier, posted his own spy, one Paul Auguste Taschereau-Fargues, to watch over Robespierre; but Taschereau double-crossed him, spying on Vadier for Robespierre instead. Their world was claustrophobically intimate, overstretched loyalties criss-crossing in a complex web of treachery and allegiance, given then withdrawn: Taschereau was also a friend of Tallien’s, and through him Thérésia’s, advising them about how she could avoid arrest.

Three days after Robespierre signed Thérésia’s arrest warrant, a nineteen-year-old girl called Cécile Renault went to his lodgings in the rue Saint Honoré. When she was told that he was not at home, and asked what her business was, she replied that she had just come ‘to see what sort of a thing was a tyrant’. Although she was only carrying two unconvincing-looking knives, she was accused of attempting to
murder Robespierre. When questioned by the Committee of Public Safety, she said that she deserved to die–not because she had wanted to kill Robespierre but because of her anti-republican sentiments. Renault and her entire family–except for two brothers fighting at the front, whom they could not be bothered to wait to recall–were guillotined.

Robespierre’s response to this assassination attempt, if such it was, and another two days earlier on his colleague Collot d’Herbois, was to introduce the laws of 22 Prairial (10 June) which were designed to expedite revolutionary justice. Henceforth people could be arrested simply for ‘impairing the purity of the revolutionary government’–a crime of which Thérésia was certainly guilty. When suspects were tried, no proof was needed to convict them and they were not allowed either a defence counsel or to call witnesses. ‘Arbitrary power against which the revolution ought to have been directed,’ as Germaine de Staël observed, ‘had acquired a new strength from the revolution itself.’

Towards the end of May, Thérésia and Tallien were reunited at her ex-husband’s country house, Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Versailles. Robespierre’s spies reported that Tallien had spent several nights at the house of the Cabarrus-Fontenay woman, former noble, whom they had thought was in Paris. The net was closing in on her.

Thérésia was arrested in a Versailles hotel on the night of 30 May and taken straight to a revolutionary committee in the capital where she was interrogated. Helen Williams, arrested with her sister the previous summer, described the committee rooms and their ante-chambers at night as ‘crowded with commissaries and soldiers, some sleeping, some writing, and others amusing themselves with pleasantries of a revolutionary nature, to which we listened trembling’. Pikes and guns were leant casually against the walls, tobacco smoke filled the air and the red-capped guards were usually drunk. As Richard Cobb writes, inebriation was ‘an important component in a certain type of revolutionary excitability’. Wine stains smear the minute books of popular societies and gaolers’ records.

By 1794 Paris had about fifty makeshift prisons, but they were so full that it took some time to persuade one to admit Thérésia. She and her escort spent a day and most of a night driving around Paris looking
for a gaol with space for her, passing the bloody guillotine in the Place de la Révolution several times, to the delight of her guards. Finally the women’s side of La Force, originally a debtors’ prison, in the Marais, agreed to take her.

Rat-infested, damp and filthy, La Force was one of the most feared of the revolutionary gaols; the princesse de Lamballe, Marie-Antoinette’s friend, had been taken from there, killed, disembowelled and mutilated in September 1792. Its only equal in notoriety was Sainte-Pélagie, where Manon Roland had been held. Eight guards watched greedily as Thérésia was strip-searched and given a rough, sleeveless shift to put on. Her clammy stone-walled cell contained a straw pallet instead of a bed. For twenty-five days she was held there alone, not allowed to see the sky, not allowed to wash or to change her clothes. When Robespierre was informed about how dreadful the conditions were in which the celebrated beauty was being held, he is said to have said, ‘Let her look in a mirror once a day.’

On 8 June, Robespierre presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being, his rebuttal of the moves towards dechristianization and official atheism made at the end of 1793 by his political enemies, several of whom were already dead. Robespierre disapproved of violence against religion almost as strongly as he disapproved of the Catholic Church’s former abuses, and he passionately believed that republican morality was incompatible with godlessness. ‘The true priest of the Supreme Being is Nature itself; its temple is the universe; its religion virtue,’ he had declared a month earlier, when he announced that the
fête
would take place. ‘Its festivals [are] the joy of a great people assembled under its eyes to tie the sweet knot of universal fraternity and to present before it the homage of pure and feeling hearts.’

It was rumoured on the streets of Paris that Robespierre was planning to use the festival to ‘proclaim himself king, open the prisons and re-establish order and religion’, but in the event he contented himself with leading the procession of white-clad girls and deputies carrying
bouquets (handy for masking the stench of blood and rotting flesh that permeated the city) and playing a central role in the symbolic tableaux devised by David. Like the king on his last official public appearance in July 1792, Robespierre was conspicuous in a sea of unpowdered heads by the old-fashioned formality of his hairstyle.

David’s decorative scheme for the celebrations re-emphasized the exclusively domestic, maternal role that Robespierre expected of female republicans. Women taking part in the festival were explicitly defined as mothers. Pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers with their babies were specifically invited to walk in the procession supported by their husbands, and unmarried girls wore ribbons embroidered with the motto, ‘When we are mothers’. In Le Puy, at a similar celebration in honour of the Supreme Being, when an old woman gave a signal during the ceremony in the deconsecrated church every woman in the congregation turned round and lifted their skirts at the altar as a raucous mark of disrespect for the new idol.

Liberty herself had been officially demoted by David, for here she was represented not by a statue of an idealized female figure or a red-capped actress, as in previous festivals, but by an oak tree. The figure of Hercules, cipher for the French people, held a tiny statuette of Liberty in his mighty fist. She was no longer a goddess before whom the French nation bowed down: Liberty had become its plaything.

After Thérésia’s arrest, Paul Auguste Taschereau-Fargues saw a devastated Tallien on the Champs-Élysées. He did not need to ask why he looked so sad. Tallien’s mother rented an attic room opposite La Force so that her lovesick son could sit close to where Thérésia was being held, and breathe the air she breathed.

Robespierre’s agents visited Thérésia at La Force and tried to persuade her to betray Tallien, promising her her freedom and a passport, but she replied that she would prefer to die. Only Taschereau’s intervention kept her from being brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Finally, hoping that she might incriminate herself or Tallien
if she was placed in less severe conditions, Robespierre ordered Thérésia put into the common cells.

Prisoners, expecting every day to die, tried to live as normal a life as possible in their confinement. About fifteen gaols–called
maisons de santé
–were, until the high point of the Terror, reserved for the richest inmates, who were held without locks on their doors or bars on their windows and guarded, in the Luxembourg, by a famously kind turnkey. Men and women ate together at large, communal tables; people sang and formed musical groups; games of cards, charades and epigrams were played, as they had once been played in gilded salons. Conversation was still highly prized. ‘You may kill us when you please,’ was the philosophy, ‘but you cannot prevent us from being civilised.’

Gossip and flirtation were the pleasures of prison life, and lasting attachments were often formed. At the Luxembourg, in particular, there were so many aristocratic detainees that the atmosphere was that of a house-party. Some inmates could not resist using their forbidden titles, continuing to address one another in whispers as ‘Madame la duchesse’ or ‘Monsieur le comte’–increasingly often with fatal repercussions.

Women who had once changed their clothes three times a day with the help of several maids preserved these habits as a matter of pride, despite having to do their laundry themselves and having been allowed to bring with them to prison when they arrived only as much clean linen as they could tie up into a handkerchief. In the morning these ladies came down in a ‘coquettish demi-toilette…arranged with a freshness and grace that by no means suggested they had spent the night on a pallet, and oftener still on fetid straw’. At midday for exercise they reappeared in full dress, with their hair elegantly done and their manners ‘more decided and dignified’ than earlier. The yard of the Conciergerie at noon was, according to Jacques-Claude Beugnot, like a garden ‘adorned with flowers, but fenced round with iron’. At night they changed once again into relaxed ‘undress’.

The spirit of camaraderie was pervasive. ‘United by the strong bond of common calamity, the prisoners considered themselves as bound to soften the general evil by mutual kind offices.’ Gallows humour also
helped cut the tension. At the Conciergerie prisoners play-acted the Revolutionary Tribunal and the execution, adding a final scene in hell attended by ghosts swathed in sheets and the Devil tugging at the victim’s feet.

Each evening, the list of the names of the following day’s victims arrived, and summonses from the Revolutionary Tribunal. To be called to the Conciergerie was to receive a death sentence: no one left there except in a tumbrel. After the laws of Prairial were passed the pace of the killings increased dramatically. One hundred and fifty-five people had been guillotined in the month of Germinal (March–April); 354 died in Floréal (April–May); 509 in Prairial (May–June); and 796 in Messidor (June–July).

Great
fournées
, or batches, of prisoners were taken off at once to the guillotine. At the height of these events, known as the Great Terror, 149 people left the Luxembourg in a single night. Some went mad. One girl whose entire family had been killed remained in prison motionless, refusing to eat, clutching her pet parrot to her bosom. When her friends tried to persuade her to eat, telling her that her parrot was hungry, she would say only, ‘No, he wants nothing–my parrot is like me, he wants nothing.’ Others were inspired to extraordinary acts of courage, selflessness and dignity. When a fifty-year-old prisoner heard the guards shout out his twenty-one-year-old son’s name, which was almost the same as his, he answered the call ‘with uncommon alacrity’ and went in his son’s place ‘with a look of exultation to the scaffold’.

There were so many headless bodies to dispose of, and so little time, that the corpses were simply stripped, thrown into a mass grave-pit and covered with quicklime to staunch the sickly smell of rotting flesh and prevent the dogs and rats from feasting on the bodies.

It was not just the rich who were imprisoned during this period, but anyone associated with the former ruling class; they seldom had access to advice on their cases or money to ease their time in prison. The female gardener employed at Lucy de la Tour du Pin’s house in Paris was arrested in the autumn of 1793 for making remarks ‘unworthy of a citizen’ and held in the Abbaye for eight months. When she was interrogated the following May, she insisted that she had never ‘allowed
herself to be dragged into involvement in any political matter’, and later supplied the ward officials with letters detailing her honesty signed by thirty-three known patriots. Her case was far from unique.

Rose de Beauharnais, the future Empress Joséphine and a friend of Tallien’s, was held in Les Carmes, a former convent whose walls were still stained with the blood from the September massacres eighteen months earlier. Most of the women there, packed as many as eighteen to a cell, wore short shift dresses called
pierrots
, saving their best clothes for the journey to the scaffold. They might be called to the guillotine at any moment, and they wanted to be ready; they also kept their hair short to avoid having it cut by the executioner. Rose had been arrested on April 20. Her twelve-year-old son Eugéne rushed to ask Tallien to come to their aid. But ‘he who would have been willing to help us was already powerless to do so,’ remembered her daughter, Hortense.