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,