Madame Tallien was the daughter of Francois Cabarrus, a wealthy Spaniard who was the banker of the Spanish Court.  The great influence which she unquestionably exerted over her contemporaries was wholly due to her astounding physical beauty.  Her intellectual equipment was meagre in the extreme.  At one period of her life she courted the society of Madame de Stael and other intellectuals, but Princess Helene Ligne said of her that she “had more jargon than wit.”  As regards her physical attractions, however, no dissentient voice has ever been raised.  “Her beauty,” the Duchess d’Abrantes says in her memoirs, “of which the sculptors of antiquity give us but an incomplete idea, had a charm not met with in the types of Greece and Rome.”  Every man who approached her appears to have become her victim.  Lacretelle, who himself worshipped at her shrine, says, “She appeared to most of us as the Spirit of Clemency incarnate in the loveliest of human forms.”  At a very early age she married a young French nobleman, the Marquis de Fontenay, from whom she was speedily divorced.  It is not known for what offence she was arrested and imprisoned.  Probably the mere fact that she was a marquise was sufficient to entangle her in the meshes of the revolutionary net.  It is certain, however, that whilst lying under sentence of death in the prison at Bordeaux she attracted the attention of Tallien, the son of the Marquis of Bercy’s butler and ci-devant lawyer’s clerk, who had blossomed into “a Terrorist of the first water.”  He obtained her release and she became his mistress.  She took advantage of the equivocal but influential position which she had attained to engage in a vile traffic.  She and her paramour amassed a huge fortune by accepting money from the unfortunate prisoners who were threatened with the fate which she had so narrowly escaped, and to which she was again to be exposed.  The venal lenity shown by Tallien to aristocrats rendered him an object of suspicion, whilst the marked tendency displayed by Robespierre to mistrust and, finally, to immolate his coadjutors was an ominous indication of the probable course of future events.  Robespierre had already destroyed Vergniaud by means of Hebert, Hebert by means of Danton, and Danton by means of Billaud.  As a preliminary step to the destruction of Tallien, he caused his mistress to be arrested, probably with a view to seeing what evidence against her paramour could be extracted before she was herself guillotined.

From this point in the narrative history is merged into legend.  The legend would have us believe that on the 7th Thermidor the “Citoyenne Fontenay” sent a dagger to the “Citoyen Tallien,” accompanied by a letter in which she said that she had dreamt that Robespierre was no more, and that the gates of her prison had been flung open.  “Alas!” she added, “thanks to your signal cowardice there will soon be no one left in France capable of bringing such a dream to pass.”  Tallien