Madame Tallien (1773-1835), in yellow dress with fichu, blue checked red scarf twisted in her long powdered curling hair

Jeanne Marie Ignace Thérésa Cabarrus, the daughter of François Cabarrus, a French-born governor of the Royal Bank of Spain and his Spanish wife, was married at the age of fifteen to the last Marquis de Fontenay and was presented at the court of Louis XV. She began to take an interest in liberal politics and when her husband fled the French Revolution in 1789, she resumed her maiden name and obtained a divorce in 1791. She fled to Bordeaux and was arrested and jailed as the former wife of an aristocrat. She met Jean Lambert Tallien, the Comissary of the Convention who saved her from the guillotine and became his mistress and accompanied him back to Paris where she was imprisoned by Robespierre. She married Tallien in 1794 and joined the conspiracy to oust Robespierre and was released from prison in 1795. She became one of the leaders of Parisian social life and one of the originators of the neo-Greek feminine styles of the French Directoire period. Thérésa and Jean Lambert Tallien divorced in 1802 and she later married François-Joseph-Philippe de Riquet, Comte de Caraman, later Prince of Chimay, in 1805. She became an amateur miniaturist and one of her works, in the Real Academia de San Fernando, Madrid, is illustrated in M. Tomás, La miniatura retrato en España, Barcelona, 1953, pl. LXXX.