Free Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore Page B

shares she had and pawned her jewels to fund her newly modest existence, proudly recoiled from any suggestion of impropriety – even, according to one report, scorning personal cleanliness, a mark of the ‘professional coquette’, as a political statement – and turned her back on her past. The revolution offered her a new life: ‘the kept woman,’ as Simon Schama phrases it, ‘had become a free person’.
    Nearly every day Théroigne walked in the Palais Royal, absorbing the new ideas of liberty and equality that she heard there. ‘What most impressed me was the atmosphere of general benevolence; egoism seemed to have been banished, so that everyone spoke to each other, irrespective of distinctions [of rank],’ she marvelled. ‘During this moment of upheaval, the rich mixed with the poor and did not disdain to speak to them as equals.’ Her private transformation was mirrored on the faces of the people she saw around her. ‘Everyone’s countenance seemed to me to have altered; each person had fully developed his character and his natural facilities,’ she wrote. ‘I saw many who, thoughcovered in rags, had a heroic air.’ Heroism seemed possible even for a woman with a past like hers; humiliation had been displaced by equality and opportunity.
    So stirred was she by this spectacle that she decided to move to Versailles, where the National Assembly met, to watch their debates on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. She was overcome by the beauty and grandeur of the Assembly. Every day, wearing her amazone , Théroigne sat in the same seat in the visitors’ gallery, or tribune; every day she was the first to arrive and the last to leave. Although initially she could hardly follow the debates, little by little she began to understand the issues. ‘My devotion to the revolution increased as I grew better informed and became convinced that right and justice were on the people’s side.’
    Théroigne was in her usual place in the tribune of the National Assembly on the afternoon of 5 October 1789 when the market women entered Versailles. She left before the session ended, perhaps unamused by the sight of the marchers debasing the hall she so revered with their poissard banter; but, wanting to see what was going on, she walked with a friend to her street corner and saw the Flanders regiment, the royal bodyguard and the female marchers with their cannon pass by. On her way home she saw three or four unhappy people who had not eaten for several days; she brought them some bread, and then went back to her lodgings for the night.
    When she returned to the Assembly as usual at about six or half past the following morning and heard that it had been in session throughout the night, she went out into the crowds gathered in front of the palace to hear what they were saying. Dressed in a riding-habit, as usual – she had one in scarlet, one in white, and one in black – she mingled with the market women and soldiers before taking her seat in the tribune again.
    In 1791, when she was held prisoner in Austria, Théroigne was cross-examined about those October days. The Austrian government, fearful of upheaval in their own territories and keen to defend Marie-Antoinette, wanted to know whether the duc d’Orléans had paid the women to go to Versailles and cause trouble. Théroigne, surprised at the allegation, replied that although she did not know Orléans shebelieved him to be a good patriot. They were also curious about stories of men dressed as women, but Théroigne had not seen any. When they asked her what she thought had caused the demonstration, she replied the people’s enthusiasm for liberty and their devotion to it. It was clear from her deposition that it was not she who had led the bloodthirsty mob into the palace, bribed the marchers on behalf of Orléans or plotted to assassinate the queen, the crimes of which the Austrians and the French royalists, keen to find a scapegoat, suspected