Lucile Duplessis

Lucile Duplessis (1770 – April 13, 1794) was the daughter of Annette Duplessis and Claude Duplessis, a Treasury official. She had one sister, Adèle, who was briefly engaged to Maximilien Robespierre. A flirtatious yet dreamy and sometimes morbid girl, Lucile was fascinated by the tragic figure of Mary Stuart. She imagined, quite prophetically, that she would also die young.

She married the French revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins, her childhood tutor, on December 29 1790 at the Church of Saint Sulpice in Paris. The only child of the marriage, Horace Camille, was born on July 6 1792. Robespierre stood as godfather to the child and remained an intimate friend of the family until Camille's arrest, at the urging of Louis-Antoine Saint Just, which Robespierre supported.

Less than two weeks after her husband was sent to the guillotine, Lucile was arrested for supposedly exciting a prison revolt to free him. She told the Tribunal that she was happy for death to "send me to my husband." While imprisoned, she befriended and comforted Françoise Hébert, the widow of Jacques Hébert (the editor of "Le Père Duchesne"), for whom her husband had cherished little affection. Lucile was sent to the guillotine on April 13, 1794.

Lucile is reputed (apocryphally) to have gotten herself arrested by running into the street and shouting "Vive le roi"!" In this she is the inspiration for Massenet's "Thérèse".