One woman who certainly was a salient consideration to Napoleon
during the dreadful limbo of summer 1795 was Theresia Tallien. How
Napoleon came into her orbit is uncertain. Junot recalls that he and
Marmont ran into Napoleon's schoolmate Bourrienne in Paris; the three
of them then played a penurious version of the Three Musketeers to
Bonaparte's d' Artagnan, roaming around Paris and knocking on the doors
of the influential. For some reason, possibly his memory of Napoleon at
Toulon, one of the doors opened to them was that of forty-year-old Paul
Barras (who had been a commissar at Toulon), one of the five most
powerful men in Paris. Barras was part of the famous salon which met at
'La Chaumiere' - the elegant house made up to look like a cottage, where
lived Jean-Lambert Tallien, architect of Robespierre's downfall and
president of the Thermidorian Convention.
But the more significant inhabitant was his new wife Theresia
Cabarrus. At the influential 'Chaumiere' salon could be found Barras,
Stanislas Freron, the young financial genius Gabriel Ouvrard, Joseph
Chenier - said to have connived at the guillotining of his brother Andre,
the poet, during the Terror - the American envoy James Monroe,
together with Germaine de Stael and notorious women of the time,
including Fortunee Hamelin, Juliette Recamier and Rose de Beauharnais.
It was overwhelmingly a milieu of the powerful, the beautiful and, above
all, the young: Ouvrard was twenty-eight, Tallien twenty-seven, and at
forty Barras and Freron counted as old men.
Still only twenty-two 'la Cabarrus', the reigning beauty of Thermidor
ian society, had already packed a lifetime's adventure into her glittering
career. She had been married and divorced by twenty-one and had
narrowly escaped the guillotine during the Terror. Both pleasure-loving
and philoprogenitive, she had numerous lovers, including Barras and the
banker Ouvrard and would end her career as the Princesse de Chimay.
Napoleon was at once fascinated and repelled by her: fascinated by her
bewitching beauty and power over men, yet repelled by her promiscuity
and the airs and graces she gave herself. The story that Napoleon made
overtures to her and was rebuffed is abs urd: at this juncture Napoleon
was a nobody and Theresia could have her pick of any man in the
Thermidorian elite - and did so.
Theresia Tallien symbolized the new hedonistic Paris, given over to
sensuality and gratification. Paris was a world away from the repressed
revolutionary society Napoleon had last seen in 1792. The Thermidorian
reaction released rivers of the pleasure principle, pent-up by Robespier
rean austerity, and in this the new society resembled Restoration England
after the puritanism of Cromwell, or the luxury and opulence of the
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