Thérésa Tallien

Thérésa Cabarrus, best known as Madame Tallien (31 July 1773 – 15 January 1835), was a French social figure during the Revolution. Later she became Princess of Chimay.

Life

Early life

Born Juana María Ignazia Teresa Cabarrús in Carabanchel Alto, Madrid, Spain, the daughter of François Cabarrus, a French-born governor of what later became the Royal Bank of Spain, and his Spanish wife, she was said to be of great beauty. In 1788, aged fourteen, she married the last Marquis de Fontenay and was presented at the court of King Louis XVI. In the 1780s she began to take an interest in Liberalism, and, when her husband fled at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, she resumed her maiden name and obtained a divorce in 1791.

She took refuge in Bordeaux, where she was arrested and jailed as the former wife of an émigré aristocrat. She met Jean Lambert Tallien, the Commissary of the National Convention, who saved her from the guillotine, and became his mistress - through her influence, Thérésa Tallien obtained the release of many prisoners. She accompanied him when he was recalled to Paris, only to be imprisoned on Maximilien Robespierre's orders first in La Force prison, then in Carmes prison where she met Joséphine de Beauharnais. She married Tallien on 26 December 1794.

Thermidor and Directory

Her husband joined the conspiracy to oust Robespierre, and in 1794, Thérésa was released. She was a moderating influence on her husband: after the outbreak of the Thermidorian Reaction, she earned the moniker Notre-Dame de Thermidor ("Our Lady of Thermidor") as the person who was most likely to intervene in favor of the detained.

Thérésa became one of the leaders of the Parisian social life. Her salon was famous and she was one of the originators of the Neo-Grec women's fashion of the French Directory period. She was a very colorful figure; one story is that she was said to bathe in the juice of strawberries for their healing properties. She once arrived at the Tuileries Palace, the then chief residence of Napoleon Bonaparte, supported by a black page, with six sapphire rings in the feet, eight in the hands, two gold bracelets in the ankles, eighteen in the arms and a forehead band full of rubies. On another occasion she appeared at the Paris Opera wearing a white silk dress without sleeves and not wearing any underwear. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand commented: "Il n'est pas possible de s'exposer plus somptueusement!" ("It is not possible to exhibit oneself more sumptuously!").

Marriage to Riquet

Tallien's power waned and he and Thérésa divorced in 1802. After a brief flirtation with Napoleon, she moved first to the powerful Paul Barras; then to the millionaire speculator Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard; and finally, attempting to gain respectability, she married François-Joseph-Philippe de Riquet, Comte de Caraman, on 22 August 1805 - he had become the sixteenth Prince of Chimay after the death of his childless uncle in 1804. She spent the rest of her life first in Paris, then on the Chimay estates (now in Belgium). After the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, these became part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

The couple invited musicians such as Daniel Auber, Rodolphe Kreutzer, Luigi Cherubini, Charles de Bériot and Maria Malibran to Paris and later to Chimay, where Thérésa held a little court. Cherubini composed his Mass in fa at their castle there.

Thérésa died in Chimay, where she was interred with François-Joseph de Riquet under the sacristy of the local church where a memorial stands to her memory. She bore ten children during her various liaisons, including Joseph de Riquet, first son of François-Joseph-Philippe, who became the seventeenth Prince of Chimay in 1843.

Cultural References

As Teresa Cabarrús, she is a prominent character in Baroness Orczy's novel, The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel.