Madame Tallien

A Biographical Sketch.

Originally published in Saint Pauls (Virtue & Co.) vol.1 #4 (Jan 1868).

Terezia Cabarrus, the subject of the present sketch, was born at Bayonne shortly before the breaking out of the great Revolution in which she came to be so prominent an actor. Her father, a Spanish banker and merchant, owed his social position entirely to his wealth. Terezia may be said to have been born a "beauty," so early is her extraordinary loveliness recorded. Her girlhood was passed between Bayonne and Madrid; but neither the sunny solitude of the provincial town nor the stately aristocracy of Madrid sufficed to procure this parvenue Venus the homage for which she craved. Paris alone was a shrine worthy of such a divinity,and to Paris she came in order to finish her education. What species of education this might be, judging from her subsequent career, we need not inquire.
        The time was one of unexampled freedom, both of manners and of speech. In the early days of the Revolution all the old landmarks suddenly disappeared, and a species of social chaos succeeded. Chastity ceased to be a charm in woman, and honour was no longer indispensable in man. The nation was fast hurrying towards that reckless cynicism which culminated in the worship of the Goddess of Reason, as personified by undraped beauty. Never had France declaimed so loudly about virtue, patriotism, and brotherly love, and never had public faith and private character sunk to so low an ebb. The horrors of the Revolution had not yet commenced, the king still tottered on his throne, and the presence of a dissolute and brilliant aristocracy but ill-concealed the turbulent elements seething under the glittering surface. The beautiful Terezia, early introduced into this dissolute society, but too readily lent herself to its fatal temptations. Her extraordinary beauty, of the purest Spanish type, as well as her remarkable grace, somewhat melodramatic withal, at once marked her as an object of more than admiration to the sated voluptuaries and courtly sinners among whom she lived. Like Herodias she danced deliciously, and like Sappho she sang divinely; she could also understand the language of love in three different tongues. An aged Don Juan, by name De Fontenay, an aristocrat and a marquis, who, under the mask of extreme gravity and the most polished manners, concealed every vice of his type, was at once attracted by Terezia, and married her. Great fêtes at his château near Paris inaugurated this mercenary alliance, which was but the first step in her downward career. As the Marquise de Fontenay she was placed on a social pedestal even in that exclusive aristocracy which, in those undeveloped days of liberty, was still considered de rigueur. Her beauty now belonged to the Court and the Court circle, and she readily found round her a society as brilliant and attractive as it was hollow and dissolute. Illusions of all kinds were the order of the day, freedom joined with absolute servility to caste, personal vice under the mask of national virtue, loyalty disguising revolutionary intrigues, patriotism in a worn-out and effete society, incapable of a single new emotion or noble sentiment. In this unreal and vile entourage reigned supreme the dissipated marquise and her aged proprietor.
        But, as of old, they eat, they drank, they married, and were given in marriage, until the flood came and swallowed them up. Thus was this artificial and depraved world engulphed by the first waves of that social deluge, the great Revolution! Our parvenue marquise and her aged spouse at once collapsed, and, as they had been foremost in the ranks of folly and of exclusiveness, were foremost in flight from the inevitable fate awaiting all aristocrats. She had come from the south; to the south they fled for refuge, across the desolate landes of the Gironde, where nature, scarce and arid in external features, furnished so rich a harvest of loyal sons destined to sacrifice their lives in a noble endeavour to rescue France from tyranny and bloodshed. Tracked and arrested, the De Fontenays were carried off prisoners to Bordeaux, where the same drama of horrors was being enacted, on a smaller theatre, as at Paris, under the management of the unscrupulous young proconsul, Tallien, sent down from the central clubs to superintend and legalise massacre. Ready-witted, swift-penned, and ambitious, he was one of those unwholesome human funguses generated in the hotbed of the Revolution. He had been ready, up to the time of his appointment as state-butcher at Bordeaux, to join any party, however sanguinary, which for the moment gained the ascendency. He may not have been naturally as cruel as his compeers, Collot d'Herbois, Marat, or Robespierre,—indeed, his subsequent acts would almost make the accusation of cruelty appear unjust;—but he was cruel enough to sacrifice any amount of lives for the advancement of his personal ambition. Not until the nation was disgusted with the brutalities of Robespierre, and mercy and peace became the fashion, did Tallien cease to be cruel, making mercy serve as a stepping-stone to love and power. His reputation as a prominent member of the Jacobins stood, however, at this time, high. He had mainly contributed to the horrors of the 10th of August. He had been brutally foremost in persecuting the unhappy prisoners of the Temple, denying them the poor comfort of mutual communication, and not only voting for the death of the king, but calling on the Convention to carry out the sentence on that very day, with a noisy vehemence and a reckless unconcern which shocked even his Jacobite brethren. He had come to Bordeaux, not only to establish there the Revolutionary committees, but also to pursue to the death, among their arid plains and poverty-stricken homes, the unhappy Girondists. Up to this time Tallien had discharged his barbarous mission with every atrocity of which he was capable, and the city guillotine was, by his orders, erected in the great square, opposite the windows of the Prefecture, his residence, enabling him personally to superintend and enjoy the executions. Before this young proconsul appeared Terezia Cabarrus, accused as an enemy of the Convention.
        With the name of Tallien opens the second act of Terezia's romantic career. It is indeed to his name, coupled with her beauty, that she owes the celebrity her otherwise commonplace character has acquired. Thrice in Paris she had previously met him: once in the studio of Madame le Brun, the artist; a second time in the garden of Alexander Lameth, when he presented her with a bunch of white roses, symbolical of her merciful influence over him; again, in the Convention, where his loud and daring speech, his dramatic action, and imposing presence, made him, at twenty-four, a central figure. When, with her husband, she was flung into the filthy prison provided for proscribed royalists, where she afterwards declared the rats had gnawed her feet, she little imagined that this darkest night was to be followed by so brilliant a dawn.
        It is said that when Tallien was told who had become his prisoner, he was greatly moved, and ordered that she should at once appear before him. Phryne before her judges did not produce a more overwhelming emotion than this lovely Spaniard of twenty before this Brutus of twenty-four. She came, was seen, and conquered. Those were days when all the world was young and giddy,—men, women, ideas, politics, principles. Youth and a desire for novelty, joined to hatred and contempt of the past, were great incentives to the Revolution. Terezia's soft eyes turned with pathetic earnestness on Tallien; her glorious hair, "long as a king's mantle," hung in disorder around her. "You know me," said she. "Yes, citizen; why have you come to Bordeaux?" "Because every one is in prison at Paris." "Of what are you accused, and why are you here with the ci-devant Marquis de Fontenay? Are you attempting to emigrate?" "No," replied Terezia; "I am a republican already; we were on our way to Spain to visit my father." "Your trial shall at once take place. If you are innocent—." "Great Heaven!" cried she. "Trial! then we are already condemned. I, the wife of an aristocrat and a marquis, what hope have 1?" Her soft hand fell, as if involuntarily, on Tallien's arm. He started and coloured. "You are wrong, citizen; we do not assassinate in the name of the law." He took her hand in his and kissed it. "What can I do for you?" said he. "Set me at liberty; give De Fontenay his liberty." "Oh, as for him, I shall certainly not interfere. I believed you desired to be divorced." "Perhaps I do; perhaps I am divorced; but, at all events, I would liberate him." She threw herself on her knees before Tallien, "Rise, citizen!" said he, encircling her with his arms as he raised her; "I am playing my head, but, no matter, you are free."
        Madame de Fontenay, as we will call her for the last time, announced to the marquis that he might depart, but that she remained at Bordeaux as his hostage. Under the rosy colouring of this encounter on "delicate ground," we are to understand that Tallien plainly offered Terezia the choice of his love or death. His ardent passion may really have found some echo in her own heart. She was disgusted and weary of her vicious old husband, divorce was easy, love begets love, and her life was on the balance. That Tallien was at least sincere, his whole after-life sufficiently proves. Next day the divorce was formally announced and duly legalised.
        Without inquiring too curiously into the motives of this sudden change, we must now shift the scene, and behold the ci-devant marquise relapsed into the full-blown parvenue, reigning supreme as revolutionary Venus in much-enduring and trembling Bordeaux. Seated by the side of the proconsul, flaunting through the streets in gaudy equipages, assisting at the tribunal, foremost in processions, adored, powerful, beautiful; laying, indeed, the foundation of that notoriety which subsequently gained for her the title of "Madame Thermidor," by which she is still known, she ever filled the public eye. What became of her aged husband does not appear, history not considering him worthy of further notice than to record that he was liberated. Perhaps he lived to join in the triumphs of his once-wife, perhaps he fled into Spain; but he appears, at all events, quietly to have accepted his fate, whatever that might have been, and, like an actor whose part terminates early in the drama, he quits the scene to appear no more.
        But Madame Tallien, as we must henceforth call her, adapts herself with marvellous versatility to her new position; indeed, her present position was one much more congenial to her nature than the rigid etiquette of the old régime. From the people she had risen, to the people she returned. She sympathised with them, and they with her, admiring and applauding her to the echo. Bordeaux became to her a vast stage on which she daily strutted to gratify her own vanity and the curiosity of the canaille. As to Tallien, like the voluptuous Antony, he was but her lieutenant. She was one of those women that nature creates now and then, to whom beauty is absolute power, born to govern those who govern the world, to tyrannise over tyrants. Such are the Cleopatras, the Theodoras of history, and such was our Terezia. She went forth like death, conquering and to conquer.
        It is pleasant to record that her reign was one of mercy. The odious guillotine no longer encumbered the neighbourhood of the Prefecture. She would not live there, she said, until it was removed. When she sat on the tribunal by the side of Tallien, she was blessed as an angel of mercy, the emptying prisons and moderate judgments being recognised as the result of her influence. The male parvenu having found his mate, they acted and re-acted favourably on each other. Her beauty, grace, and natural amiability humanised the amorous Tallien, who was without fixed principles of any sort. Exaggerations of all kinds being the order of the day, her popularity rapidly increased, until it reached a species of fury. When she appeared in a riding-habit, with hat, tricolour, and feathers, and pronounced patriotic orations in the church of the Ricolets, or drove in a golden car about the streets, draped in a white clamyde, lance in hand, the red cap of liberty on her head, she but identified herself with the spirit of the time. So easily do men's minds, especially in France, lend themselves to the sequence of events, however caricatured and unnatural they may become! A change so sudden in the conduct of Tallien could not long escape either the observation or animadversion of the Convention, who by no means appreciated the fascinating influence of Terezia with the same enthusiasm as the Bordelais. Her devotion to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, was joined to inconvenient heresies on the subject of mercy and pardon, and Robespierre, duly advertised of the measures of the young proconsul, frowned ominously, and commanded his immediate return to Paris. Madame Tallien followed him—a proof either of her devotion or her vanity. Up to that time her beauty had secured her so triumphant a career that she may have contemplated subjugating Robespierre and all the Jacobins as easily as she had seduced the facile Tallien.
        Robespierre desired, in recalling Tallien to Paris, first to discredit, and then to ruin him. St. Just sarcastically alluded to Samson's locks shorn by the fair Dalilah, and declared that Tallien had not only ceased to be a patriot, but was actually an enemy to the holy cause of the republic. Great, therefore, was the chagrin of his enemies when Tallien was at once chosen President of the Convention, and became the leader of a powerful party opposed to the Reign of Terror. Between these two,—Tallien and Robespierre,—life or death hung in the balance—life to France, and the true principles of the Revolution if Tallien prevailed—death, utter, universal bloodshed and death, not only to the nation, but to the cause of liberty, if Robespierre effected his avowed purpose of becoming Dictator.
        But underlying all this apparent patriotism, the most potent personal feelings prompted Tallien, who in good truth was what I have already called him,—a modern Antony. Terezia, his beloved, arrested by the express order of Robespierre, lay at that very time in the filthy prison of La Force, having failed in her attempt to fascinate the Convention, before whom she pronounced a florid oration, craving to be allowed to devote herself to poverty and obscurity. Robespierre still feared to strike openly at Tallien, but wounded him secretly through his love.
        From this moment it was a hand to hand struggle between them, and on the life of Terezia hung the destinies of France. These admirable actors ceased to attitudinise, and flung themselves body and soul into the drama. Tallien, maddened by the treachery of Robespierre, appealed to the Convention. "Long," said he, "I have silently borne calumnies and injustice, but the time is come when I will no longer be silent. The name of a woman has been mentioned in this assembly. I cannot understand why she should occupy the attention of the Convention. She has been called the daughter of Cabarrus. I declare in the face of the world, and in the midst of my colleagues, this woman is my wife. I have long known her; and I saved her life at Bordeaux. Her virtues, her misfortunes, endeared her tome. She followed me to Paris in the times of tyranny and of oppression, and she has been sentenced to a prison. An emissary of the tyrant came to her tempting her: 'Confess that you know Tallien to be an enemy to liberty; sign it, and you shall have liberty and a passport.' 'I am but twenty years old,' she replied, 'but I would rather die a hundred times.'" Twice Robespierre is said to have refused Tallien the life of Terezia. Tallien, who still hesitated, uncertain how far he dared to beard the tyrant, had no choice but to proceed. Robespierre, with the inevitable bouquet in his hand, meeting him in the street, laughed at him, and told him to beware of woman. "Is that your last word?" cried Tallien. Robespierre bowed, sniffed his flowers delicately, and passed on.
        In the meantime Terezia, attended by jailers and guarded by certain monstrous bloodhounds kept at La Force, who, after smelling each prisoner, prevented any chance of escape, found herself in a blackened cell, furnished with some damp straw and a mattress. Her beauty had failed her. Robespierre was inexorable, Tallien powerless, death inevitable. But she was not alone. Josephine, then Countess of Beauharnais, and the Duchess d'Aiguillon, shared the mattress and the straw. The cell where they lay was noted as the scene of the massacre of the priests by the Septembrionists, and their names, as well as the marks in blood of two sabres which had leant against the damp walls, reminded them of their fate. Poor butterfly Terezia, how did she bear it? She owned subsequently that she grew accustomed to horrors,—she sang and told stories while her companions read or worked at their needle. With their scissors and the teeth of their combs they wrote on the wall—"Oh, Liberty!" "We shall leave soon;" "What is death when we are already in torment?" and added their names—"Citoyenne Tallien," "Josephine de Beauharnais," "D'Aiguillon."
        Terezia was allowed, as a special favour, to walk after nightfall in the court of the prison. She knew not to whom she owed this privilege, but she guessed it was to Tallien, and her heart leaped as she imagined him watching over her. Where was he? Would he save her? Did he love her enough to venture his life for her? As she walked up and down, lost in thought, the flickering moon lighting up the walls and the backs of the adjoining houses, a stone fell at her feet. Round the stone was a paper written in printed letters, but under the disguise she recognised the hand of Tallien. "At least, he watches over me," cried she. "I am at hand," said the writing; "every evening, at nine o'clock, you will go into the court; I shall be near you." She looked up to the roofs of the houses, she examined each window, she tried to penetrate every shadow under the pale moonlight; all was dark and still,—not a sound but the beating of her own heart and the baying of the ferocious hounds broke the silence. Eight days running did Tallien,—there, at this hour, when the prison lights were extinguished,—communicate with her. Afterwards she was forbidden to descend into the court. Robespierre's spies had discovered that Tallien rented a granary near at hand, and came there every night to console his imprisoned love. Eternal night seemed closing around her. Day after day the hollow sounds of the tumbrils bearing prisoners to execution echoed through the cells. Tallien was either powerless or had forgotten her. She would not die without telling him that she held him for a coward and a renegade. What was he doing? Did he not know,—he, the head of a powerful party,—that each hour might be her last? She waited until the 7th Thermidor, when the jailer told her she need not make her bed, for that her turn was come for execution. Yet Tallien gave no sign. On the 4th Thermidor Tallien received a dagger. He knew it well. He had often seen it in the hands of Terezia Cabarrus. On the 7th, two days after, the following letter reached him, dated from La Force;—"The superintendent of police has just left. He came to announce that I shall be called to the tribunal—that is to say, the scaffold—to-morrow. This news but little coincides with a dream I had last night. Robespierre was dead, and the prisons open; but, thanks to your incredible cowardice, no one will soon be found in France able to realise this."
        The same day Tallien replied to her;—"Be as prudent as I am courageous, but calm yourself." No one could be calm at such a moment; the sword hung over her head. Spite of Terezia's stinging reproach of cowardice, Tallien was boldly heading a conspiracy against Robespicrre's life. He knew that his name stood first in that tyrant's list for execution. He waited but an opportune moment openly to attack him in the Convention. True, that in the meantime Terezia might have been ordered to execution; but Tallien acted not alone, and however ready he was to sacrifice his own life for hers, he was powerless without his colleagues.
        On the 7th Thermidor at the moment that Tallien received Terezia's lctter, Robespierre passed the entire day alone at the Hermitage in the depths of the forest of Montmorency. For hours he sat deep in thought, leaning against the paling of the little garden once cultivated by Rousseau, his face paler and more livid than usual. Did he despair or hope? Did that ghastly look indicate remorse or ambition, or was he collecting himself to meet the struggle now inevitable? None can reply—a hypocrite has no confidant. Each of these men declared that he fought only for his country; but Robespicrre's patriotism meant absolute power as dictator;—Tallien's was the possession of the fair Terezia.
        On the 8th Thermidor, the last of the so-called "days of Terror," Robespierre, dressed in his blue coat, nankeen trousers, lace cravat, and bouquet in hand, went down to the Convention to pronounce the great oration he had long meditated. "Citizens," said he, "I leave to others flattering words. I am come to tell you sterner truths. I come to defend outraged authority and liberty violated. I have been represented as the author of every evil. I have been called a tyrant. And why? Because I have dared to speak the truth. What am I? A slave of liberty,—a living martyr to the republic,—the victim as well as the enemy of crime." From defence he passes rapidly to accusation. He spares no one; he sheds his venom around like a malignant reptile; he prepares hecatombs of victims by his insidious accusations. At length he has finished. There is absolute silence; not a voice, not a hand is raised to applaud him. He is asked to name the traitors to whom he has alluded. He replies with hesitation that he has endeavoured rather to expose abuses than to name individuals. He is interrupted. "You who pretend to the courage of virtue at least have the courage of truth;" and cries of "Name! name!" shake the very walls. A debate too famous among the annals of history to be reported here follows. At last Tallien rises. "The republic is in such danger," says he, "that every true citizen must be affected by it. A member of the government denounces his colleagues. This is an aggravation of evil. I demand that the veil be torn aside." Three times did the entire assembly—all, save the friends of Robespierre—receive these significant words with thundering applause. Cries of "Down with the tyrant!" are heard from all sides. Robespierre, livid with fury, rises from his seat, and vainly endeavours to mount the stairs of the tribune. He hangs on by the rails; he cannot speak; he is overwhelmed.
        Again Tallien rises. "I asked that the veil should be torn aside. I see that it is done. The real conspirators are unmasked. I knew that my life was threatened, but I was silent, until, present at the sitting of the Jacobins, I saw the army of this new Cromwell forming around him. I trembled for my country, and I armed myself with a dagger to stab him to the heart if the Convention lacked the courage to impeach him." As he spoke Tallien drew forth Terezia's dagger. She was avenged, and Robespierre had fallen.
        Again we find her the parvenue queen of a parvenue society. Her innate vanity and love of notoriety re-asserted themselves, and she parades her beauty and her toilette, and forms her salon as of old. The stage is larger; it is Paris instead of Bordeaux, but all genuine feeling and emotion have died out, and her essentially vulgar and melodramatic nature re-asserts itself. This Goddess of Beauty receives her worshippers at a charming cottage embosomed in greenery and flowers, painted within and without (as a stage cottage ought to be), situated on the banks of the Seine. The young men of that day, called "the golden youths," flocked around her. They were presumptuous beyond the permitted insolence of youth, and extraordinarily ignorant, for the Revolution had forced boys into men, and rendered a regular education impossible. Licentiousness and debauchery succeeded to isolation and terror. No longer in daily fear of death, every evil passion was unchained; they drank, they gambled, they fought duels, and talked in a jargon quite peculiar to themselves. They came in strange attire, these golden youths, contrasting strangely with the mean, and even dirty clothes worn during the Terror, when Robespierre was so singular in his new blue coat and general cleanliness. The Ladies or "Incroyables," but lately emerging from the prison of La Force or the Conciergerie, "strictly after the antique," as designed by David, the painter, draped, not dressed, displayed even more than decency permitted. Madame Tallien, who had called her fellow-prisoners, Madame Beauharnais and the Duchess d'Aiguillon, to her side, led the fashion. Like Venus, she wore golden sandals on her naked feet, and tore her gloves early in the evening in order to appear more like a goddess. They were bewitching, these divinities, very theatrical, very unreal; but the time was out of joint, and they suited it. By-and-by came the beautiful Madame Recamier, and Madame de Staël, and Hoche, and Barras, and Buonaparte,—wonderfully handsome, this young Buonaparte, and strikingly like the bust of young Augustus, divided between the charm of Josephine Beauharnais, whom he soon after married, and Madame Tallien. There were concerts at which republican generals, ci-devant members of "the Mountain," and "the Jacobites" familiar with the click of the guillotine, made sweet music along with cherubim, Mehul and Rhode; and there were causeries when Buonaparte, yielding, like Hercules, to beauty, did not spin, but kissed Madame Tallien's hand, and pressing it within his own, told her fortune. Barras also desired to be foremost among her worshippers. They danced too, those three loving friends, Madames Tallien, Beauharnais, and Reeamier, Attic dances after the majestic and classical manner, performing evolutions with Greek chlamydes, "high and disposedly," to the delight of "the golden youths" and the generals and statesmen, who all regretted even the scanty chlamydes, so much were they otherwise attired "by the grace of God." Some once has called this "the Age of Muslin," and it is well named.
        At last, the painted cottage on the banks of the Seine became too small for her adorers, and we find her removed to Paris and receiving a painted fan, "presented by the Directory."
        But the reign of frivolity, exaggeration, and ignorance, presided over by our Beauty crowned with cap and bells, could not last for ever. Neither she nor Tallien were gifted with talents equal to the occasion. He gradually lost political power, was excluded from the Directory, and came to be overshadowed by Barras. She, essentially the offspring of a disordered period, a gilded butterfly, possessed no mental gifts to retain the influence with which her beauty and peculiar circumstances alone had invested her. Bitterly did she reproach the once-loved Tallien for allowing the government he had himself established to slip from his grasp; bitterly did Tallien deplore the loss of her social influence, on which he had too entirely reckoned as a preservative of power. The world was growing serious, great wars thundered in the distance, the actions of patriotic generals occupied general attention. By degrees the golden youth became older and wiser, the women, less like actresses, grew at last into ladies. The salons of our poor Beauty were deserted. Madame de Staél robbed her of the litterateurs and the diplomates. Madame Recamier equalled her in beauty, and exceeded her in fashion and virtue. She became rococco,—a crime unpardonable in Paris. Before his marriage with Josephine, Buonaparte devoted himself to her, and even is said to have proposed a divorce from Tallien; but whether she repulsed him, or whether he found her too commonplace and frivolous to realise the splendid role he already in imagination destined for his consort, he now became as marked in his dislike as he had been in his admiration, and Josephine,—installed in the Tuileries,—was forbidden to receive Madame Tallien, obliging that excellent creature to meet her former benefactress by stealth.
        Madame Recamier, a very dragon of virtue, now declined all further relations with the equivocal heroines of the Revolution, especially with Madame Tallien, who was not in her opinion "respectable;" and she boldly sets forth in her memoires that "she never knew her," spite of chlamydes and Attic dances. And Tallien? He still loved his Terezia ardently; she was to him the same enchantress as of old; he would have borne loss of power or loss of anything but of her! She, on the contrary, cared for him but as a means, not as an end. Of very equivocal virtue, and incapable of any real attachment whatever, a beautiful mask rather than a true woman, unstable, vain, frivolous, ungrateful, she recklessly flung aside the man who, armed by her dagger, killed the Revolution to save her. She sued for a divorce. Tallien, powerless and forsaken, begged to be allowed to accompany Buonaparte to Egypt as a savant. He afterwards was appointed consul at Alicante, and died poor, blind, and solitary. But if there exist a social Nemesis for domestic crimes, Tallien was amply avenged. Again she sought, a third time, a fresh stage whereon to display her somewhat matured charms. No semblance of love is even suggested in her third marriage with the Prince de Chimay; it was simply a clever speculation. The name of Tallien with its unfortunate possessor had fallen into disgrace; the virtuous ladies of the Directory took occasion to animadvert somewhat freely on certain passages in Terezia's former life; there was an awkward vacuum between the Marquise de Fontenay and Madame Tallien. A link was wanting in the matrimonial chain, very painful to the feelings of these scrupulous dames. In the excitement of the Revolution, when men and women lived on from day to day a fevered existence between prison and the guillotine, these little discrepancies and legal flaws mattered not at all. But now that society had sobered down into conventional forms, and the Reign of Terror was forgotten, people had time to think, and ask each other questions; the answers not being in Madame Tallien's case altogether satisfactory. She was now politically and socially powerless, she could neither cajole nor crush her accusers. When, therefore, Joseph de Caraman, Prince de Chimay, peer of Hainault, and grandee of Spain, offered her his hand, Equality and Fraternity, Democracy and Republicanism, were forgotten, and she emerged again as Princess de Chimay on that social stage she loved so well to fill. Beautiful as she still was, she believed that exalted rank, like charity, covers a multitude of sins, and would force social consideration. She was cruelly deceived. Her third and last appearance in public was an utter failure, and the memory of poor forsaken Tallien was amply avenged. Spite of the magnificence of the Château of Chimay, and the brilliant artistic society assembled to amuse its ever-attractive Châtelaine; spite of the winters in Brussels, and gorgeous display of luxury and wealth, Terezia was unable to appear at Court, where, as the Prince held the post of chamberlain to King William, her absence was the more conspicuous. The frantic efforts she made to obtain admittance, the genuine expression in her letters of humiliation and almost despair, are undeniable proofs of the tortures she suffered, and how effectually they embittered every day and hour of her life. A plaintive sadness creeps over this once triumphant beauty. Accusations and calumnies, strengthened by the royal taboo, accumulate around her; as years advance her former life clings to her like Dejanira's robe, and cannot be torn away. She struggles in vain, the gates of Paradise are closed to her, and after years spent in social diplomacy she is told that the queen still refuses to receive her. Thus was Terezia Cabarrus overtaken by an avenging Nemesis, and died under a punishment most terrible to her as a beauty, most-justly deserved as a heartless woman, the ban of social ostracism.