#louis-antoine saint-just

A sketch I did some time ago for @jefflionaka@frevandrest– this depicts Saint-Just and Thèrese Gellé in happier times, the the ruined castle near Blérancourt where they often met for liaisons before her marriage and Saint-Just left for Paris for good. Someday this will be painted! Someday when I have more time… 

Imagine them all in one room @frevandrest@jefflion

ink sketch of Louis-Antoine Saint-Just gazing out a window– drawn with sepia pens and walnut ink

For@frevandrest, it’s Thérèse Gellé!

Thérèse Gellé– blond, buxom, fresh-faced and freckled– was the daughter of a wealthy notary in the village of Blérancourt where she met the future revolutionary Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. The two teenagers had a passionate love affair, having trysts in a nearby ruined castle, but Thérèse‘s father was dead set against the match and married her off to someone else. A broken-hearted Saint-Just ran off to Paris with the family silver and was later sent to prison on his mother’s behest; later Thérèse ran off to Paris, making plans to divorce her husband and taking lodgings suspiciously close to her (ex?) lover’s. Everyone in Blérancourt thought they were having an affair, but Saint-Just denied it, and he made plans to marry his good friend LeBas’s sister, but then he dumped her for suspiciously flimsy reasons. Saint-Just, near the time of Thermidor, was writing “fiction” about a stormy love affair (much of his earlier fictional output was arguably about Thérèse) but then he was executed, and the newly divorced Thérèse returned to the village, where she spent the rest of her brief life in mourning and disgrace.

This is an extremely short synopsis of this very interesting (and tragic) woman’s life– there’s more here,here, and here.