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 selfconsciously 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.
Regardless of when they first laid eyes on each other, in 1791 Tallien the ambitious messenger-boy and Thérésia the former marquise still inhabited worlds so far apart that there was no possibility of their coming together on equal ground. All that would have changed by the time they met again.
* Her French accusers said Théroigne de Méricourt had boasted of forming this club.
*Thérésia's account of her birth is just one example of this tendency: she claimed to have been born in Madrid at a grand ball given by the French ambassador, altough records show she was actually born in Carabancel, just outside Madrid.
5 RÉPUBLICAINE Manon Roland FEBRUARY 1791–MARCH 1792
My spirit and my heart find everywhere the obstacles of opinion and the shackles of prejudice, and all my force is spent in vainly rattling my chains.
MANON ROLAND
SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Thérésia de Fontenay inhabited a world in which politics was a fashion; for thirty-six-year-old Manon Roland, wife of a provincial civil servant and recently arrived in Paris, politics was an all-consuming obsession.
Manon Roland returned to Paris, the city in which she had grown up, in February 1791. Living for the most part outside the capital since her marriage eleven years earlier, she had devoted herself to realizing Rousseau's ideal of the citoyenne as a wife and mother whose political passivity was her patriotic duty. Although she acted as her husband's secretary, according to Rousseau's strictures she did not interest herself in public affairs. In 1783 she boasted to her friend Augustin Bosc d'Antic, Théroigne de Méricourt's future admirer, that she never bothered herself with politics; as late as 1787 she described herself as ‘yawning over the papers’.
But the revolution, as she phrased it, ‘engulfed’ her. By May the following year, when the the royal administration was challenged for the first time, all her indifference had dissolved. ‘But how can one speak of…private troubles,’ she demanded, ‘when there are public ones?’ In August 1789, writing to Bosc d'Antic again, she had to remind herself how to address him on a subject other than politics, but concluded, ‘We do not deserve to have a country if we are indifferent to public affairs.’
From the start, Manon was convinced the monarchy would have to go. She had emerged fully formed like Athena, clothed in her armour of uncompromising opinion, a republican from the outset. As she later wrote, ‘I had hated kings since I was a child and I could never witness without an involuntary shudder the spectacle of a man abasing himself before another man.’ In this she was more radical than her husband and their friends, most of whom were at first constitutional monarchists favouring the same type of reforms as the more progressive of Germaine de Staël's aristocratic friends.
She was also unashamedly belligerent. When her letters to Bosc d'Antic in Paris in 1789 and 1790 were intercepted and opened (as she imagined, by government spies), she responded by threatening the ‘cowards’ who had violated her rights: ‘Let them tremble to think that she [Manon] can make a hundred enthusiasts who will in turn make a million others.’ This was how she saw her role—as inspiration and support for the men who would destroy the crumbling edifice of the ancien régime and create a new, free France. The patriot, she told Bosc d'Antic, unwittingly describing her own effect on the men around her, should inflame people's courage, should ‘demand, thunder, scare’.
When she and Roland reached Paris, Manon lost no time in gathering