#primary sources

"Touched bottom again. Decided to liberate myself. We are never trapped unless we choose to be."

frequently attributed to The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944–1947

The original diary entry, from Mirages (December 7, 1944), reads:

"I touched the bottom again and then liberated myself."

Later in the same entry:

"...we are never in a trap unless we want to be."

The circulating version merges separate passages, alters the original wording, and assigns the wrong source:

This is one of the reasons I always encourage people to read the actual books themselves. The further a quote travels from its source, the more likely it is to be shortened, rewritten, merged with other passages, or assigned the wrong source altogether.

Reveal Digital is an open-access primary source program on JSTOR focused on social movements and marginalized communities. It’s built through collaborative library digitization using a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing model so the resulting collections are free for everyone. Associate Director Peggy Glahn explains in a new interview how the project grew to 70,000+ items across six collections thanks to more than 100 partner libraries in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.. She also talks about how this work helps ensure the materials remain available for generations to come.

If you're curious about the real stories preserved in primary sources and the work involved in opening them up for everyone, read the interview on the JSTOR Blog.

For some reason @sincerelyjennie I cannot reply to your post which I had saved in my drafts. It took me a few days to get it done because there was a lot of material to go over, and also because there was a second mini-heatwave.

Anyway, here's my response.

Most of these stories are unconfirmed rumors, gossip and hearsay.

The story that Robespierre might have married Éléonore and that Saint-Just was a witness came from Simon-Edme Monnel:

It has been rumored that this daughter [Éléonore] had been Robespierre’s mistress. I think I can affirm she was his wife; according to the testimony of one of my colleagues, Saint-Just had been informed of this secret marriage, which he had attended.

- Mémoires d’un prêtre regicide (1829) by Simon-Edme Monnel, page 337-338

He is the only one who claims this. He doesn't tell us who the colleague is. There is no way to verify this. It should be treated with the same sort of validity as any rumor. You want to believe it? You can. But that's all it is: a belief based on one testimony of some guy who might be writing a sweet story.

The only person who could have confirmed this is Éléonore Duplay herself, but she never wrote anything. Third parties have said she called herself Robespierre's widow - but that information doesn't come from her sister, the only one who actually left writings behind. Élisabeth only wrote: "My older sister had been promised to Robespierre." That's it. Nothing more.

Buonarroti, who was close to the sisters, wrote this in 1830:

I seem to gather that the widow’s sister has personal reasons for refusing to discuss the great man with whom she was once friends; based on some information I received a long time ago regarding her brother, I would not be surprised if he were the cause of her behavior.

- Armando Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, contributi alla storia della sua vita e del suo pensiero, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1950-1951, vol. 2, p. 53.

He says she was his friend, which is a very ambiguous and large term, and that she refuses to talk about him. He suspects her brother is to blame.

On the other hand, Charlotte Robespierre refuted it:

There are in regard to Éléonore Duplay two opinions: one, that that she was the mistress of Robespierre the elder; the other that she was his fiancée. I believe that these opinions are equally false; but what is certain is that Madame Duplay would have strongly desired to have my brother Maximilien for a son-in-law, and that she forget neither caresses nor seductions to make him marry her daughter. Éléonore too was very ambitious to call herself the Citizeness Robespierre, and she put into effect all that could touch Maximilien’s heart. But, overwhelmed with work and affairs as he was, entirely absorbed by his functions as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, could my older brother occupy himself with love and marriage? Was there a place in his heart for such futilities, when his heart was entirely filled with love for the patrie, when all his sentiments, all his thoughts were concentrated in a sole sentiment, in a sole thought, the happiness of the people; when, without cease fighting against the revolution’s enemies, without cease assailed by his personal enemies, his life was a perpetual combat? No, my older brother should not have, could not have amused himself to be a Celadon with Éléonore Duplay, and, I should add, such a role would not enter into his character. Besides, I can attest it, he told me twenty times that he felt nothing for Éléonore; her family’s obsessions, their importunities were more suited to make feel disgust for her than to make him love her. The Duplays could say what they wanted, but there is the exact truth. One can judge if he was disposed to unite himself to Madame Duplay’s eldest daughter by something I heard him say to Augustin:

“You should marry Éléonore.”

“My faith, no,” replied my younger brother.

- Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1834) page 90-91

So we have a standstill on the sources: his sister says no, her sister says yes. These are the only two sources I would trust to speak on this topic, and they disagree. Therefore the answer is: we will never truly know. Do you believe Charlotte or Élisabeth? Again, it's a matter of choice.

As for other women, there were rumors. But that's all there is. I never read the story about a woman with a tobacco shop but this is where you heard the story about a woman he paid and threw out of his apartment:

As for [Robespierre’s] continence, I only knew of a woman of about twenty-six years, whom he treated rather badly, and who idolized him. Very often he refused her at his door; he gave her a quarter of his fees.

- Souvernirs d’un déporté (1802) by Paul Villiers, who claimed to have served as Robespierre’s secretary for a few months in 1790.

Even if this man claimed he was his secretary, we have no way to know if this story is true. It could be. It could also not be.

You're probably asking yourself: well, why are these people telling these stories then? It's the simplest explanation: to make themselves interesting. Revealing some great secret about "The Tyrant Robespierre" was a currency. It's the late 18th-early 19th century equivalent of giving an "exclusive" interview to a tabloid. Some of them, like Georges Duval and Laure d'Abrantès, turned their own memories into novelizations which arguably became best-sellers. There was a whole market for this.

As for Saint-Just? He had one girlfriend. Perhaps. There is no love letter, no poem dedicated to her, no correspondence between them. There's a letter from his childhood friend Thuillier saying there's a rumor that Saint-Just kidnapped her, and Saint-Just tells him to shut that down. Everything else is conjecture.

There's Marc-Antoine Baudot who tells us a wild story that Saint-Just had a lover who saw that Baudot was on Saint-Just's "list of animosities" and she went to tell Baudot... must I really explain why this is nonsense? Now I don't know if they mean there was an actual paper list or it's just a figure of speech... but it's still absurd. As Baudot says, he already knew Saint-Just disliked him. Moreover, Saint-Just was extremely private and we already struggle to know anything about him. He was excessively conscious about his private reputation - if he could have wiped Organt from existence, he probably would have done it. So you tell me the one time he had a lover who blabbed, it was just to warn Baudot about something he already knew? Nothing else? Now why would Baudot invent this? I honestly have no idea. Maybe there was a young woman who told him this extraordinary tale and he believed her. Maybe she sought Baudot's favors or protection, and this was the story she chose to tell, and he chose to believe her. That's the best guess I have, because that makes more sense to me than the story itself. You have to consider that, much like today, sometimes people believe what they want to hear, will decide it's the "truth, and write it down for posterity.

Saint-Just was also very briefly engaged to Henriette Le Bas, but broke it off on what sounded like a pretext (she used tobacco - the story came from Élisabeth who told Hamel). Élisabeth Duplay-Le Bas believed they might have gotten back together, yet when Alphonse de Lamartine started spinning tales of their grand romance writing about "his stormy and passionate feelings for Le Bas' sister" (le sentiment orageux et passionné de Saint-Just pour la sœur de Le Bas), she immediately corrected him with "say [instead]: very calm feelings" (dites : sentiment très calme.)

Anything else about Saint-Just being with other women is fanfiction, usually royalist propaganda trying to paint him (and every other revolutionary) as sexually depraved. It's the myth of the Brutish Commoner Revolutionary forcing himself on the Innocent Noble Maiden - it's a dark fantasy rooted in classist and ideological anxieties.

It's not easy to evaluate these testimonies. You need to study the core principles of source criticism and historiography. The principles noted here when discussing a secondary source also apply to primary sources.

First you must evaluate the type of document: are they memoirs or archival records? ​

Memoirs written decades later are not objective diaries; they are highly curated, polished, edited, subjective narratives shaped by faulty memory, personal grudges, hindsight and sometimes other testimonies. They are at the crossroads between literature and history. On the other hand, contemporary evidence (letters written during the period, police reports, official registries) doesn't have the benefit of hindsight or the need to cater to a 19th-century reading public. But we have a notorious problem when it comes to Robespierre and Saint-Just: a lot of their personal letters, Saint-Just's especially, were destroyed both by the Thermidorians and reportedly by Jacques-Maurice Duplay, most likely in 1814-1815. However, because the Thermidorians got to them first, we can guess one certain thing: if there had been anything scandalous, they would have used it. And the fact is: there isn't.

Then, you need to evaluate the proximity of the witness (did they see it themselves or is it hearsay?) and their motive. Writing salacious stories about Robespierre and Saint-Just wasn't just a hobby; like I said, it could be a survival strategy or a lucrative business.

You also need corroboration. In history, a single source making a wild claim is usually a red flag, especially if it sounds fantastic or out of character. Robespierre marrying Éléonore secretly? Great romance novel. But you must ask yourself: why would he do that? There's no reason for a secret wedding; he already lives in her house. If anything, it would have been much more respectable for this marriage to be public record.

​If a claim is true, it usually leaves a paper trail or is mentioned by multiple independent parties who had no reason to coordinate their stories. This is why there's some reasonable belief that there perhaps was something between Saint-Just and Thérèse Gellé, though most of it relies on the small talk of a small village, which is inherently not the most reliable type of testimony. (Small villages like to make stuff up, or to take a possibility for a fact.)

​When a story exists only in one person's memoirs and is contradicted or ignored by everyone else who, say, lived in that house, the burden of proof isn't met. It remains a rumor, not a fact. Villiers' story about Robespierre having a lover once could be true, but we cannot know.

What can you find in a century-old love letter? The usual things: longing, gossip, travel plans, family news. And, sometimes, a shipwreck mystery.

In April 1910, Chicago native Muriel Bent was writing to Stanley Gale Harris from a ship in the Red Sea. She had so much to tell him that she split the letter into several envelopes, numbered in the corners so he’d know which to read first. Muriel told Stanley about the heat, her reading, her costume for that evening’s shipboard fancy-dress party — “improvised and mostly perishable” — and how happy she was to be getting closer to him.

Then, almost in passing, she shared a story she’d heard from another passenger:

In a shipwreck near the Aroe Islands off Northern Australia, nearly everyone was drowned. The Captain and pilot escaped in a boat, and thirty hours later picked up two young girls who had been floating all that time. One of the girls had found and saved a baby that drifted near her. They were all taken to Thursday Island where every effort was made to identify the child. But none was entered on the passenger list of the steamer and nothing about her was found. She was adopted by the wife of the head of one of the big companies, and brought up as their daughter. She is about my age now, and went to school with Mr. Williams’ older daughter. Fancy knowing nothing about yourself like that.  — View letter

The story Muriel heard was almost certainly a retelling of the wreck of the RMS Quetta, which sank in the Torres Strait near Thursday Island in 1890. Contemporary reports preserve the same haunting central detail: among the few women and children who survived was a baby girl whose identity was uncertain. She was adopted and raised in Queensland, becoming known as Cecil “Quetta” Brown.

Muriel’s version gets the geography a little wrong — the Aru, or Aroe, Islands are northwest of Australia, while the Quetta sank near Thursday Island — but that only makes the letter more revealing. This is how stories traveled: by ship, by rumor, by memory, and eventually by mail. A disaster from 1890 could still be circulating twenty years later, transformed into a shipboard anecdote and tucked into a love letter.

We just added 1,200 pages from the Harris-MacLean family papers to Newberry Transcribe — including the letters between Muriel and Stanley, written during their courtship and early married life. Volunteers have now worked through more than 95,000 pages of handwritten material across all our collections, making them searchable and available to researchers, teachers, family historians, and anyone who’s ever wanted to eavesdrop on the past.

Start transcribing: nt.newberry.org

Is it lost? Where is there mention of it in historiography? And did really Fouché explicitly talked about himself as "one behind the plot to get rid of Robespierre"?

Once again my dear, I am sorry it took me four entire months to answer this ask. :(

In fact, there is not just one letter involved in this case, but four. They are not lost, but kept in the Archives Nationales in the city of Saint-Denis and fully accessible to the public (it's just that they needed four whole months to send me everything).

The first one has no date. This is the letter you are referring to in your question, that was addressed to Fouché's sister Louise Brobant:

I must reassure you on two issues. First, our little girl [his daughter Nièvre] is doing better, and second, I have nothing to fear from Maximilien Robespierre's slanders. The Jacobin Club invited me to come and justify myself at its session; I did not go because Robespierre reigns supreme here. This Club has become his court. Soon you will learn the outcome of this event, which I hope will turn out to the advantage of the Republic. Farewell, take care. A thousand kisses. F.

This first letter was intercepted by Jean-Baptiste Bô, a Montagnard deputy from the Aveyron department at the National Convention. At that moment, he was in Nantes, where he was sent to replace Carrier. Bô immediately forwarded Fouché's letter to the Committee of Public Safety, enclosing this message written in his own hand:

Nantes, 3 Thermidor Citizens colleagues, With a little adroitness, I managed to obtain a letter that our colleague Fouchet wrote to his sister in Nantes, which I believe it was urgent to forward to you. I am sending it to you by post via a reliable sans-culotte, who is General Dufresse's deputy. He has announced that there are factions of conspirators who must be unceremoniously dealt with. I will help you with all my heart when I am able to uncover some of them. Salut et fraternité, Bô.

Over the following days, Bô continued to intercept suspicious letters that Fouché was sending to his family and allies (but not necessarily always to his sister). On 8 Thermidor, he had three of them, and he wrote a new message (which he apparently addressed to the Committee, although some sources say he wrote specifically and solely to Robespierre), but his warning reached Paris on 14 Thermidor, when it was already too late :

Nantes, 8 Thermidor To the Committee of Public Safety, I am sending you three letters from our colleague Fouchet, whose principles are known to you but whose criminal activities, in my opinion, must be swiftly exposed and punished. I cannot write to you further; my pains torment me, and if you do not call me back, there are days when I cannot work. I persist in my request for the public good more than for myself. Salut et Fraternité, Bô.

Here are the three letters in question. Fouché does not openly announce that he is involved in a conspiracy against Robespierre. But we can already sense that something very big is brewing, that his tone is threatening, and that he is confident that “justice will be done” and “tyranny will soon disappear” :

Paris, 30 Messidor Do not worry about your subsistence; it is not the government's intention that you lack the necessities of life at a time when the Republic is in abundance. I will go to the Committee of Public Safety, where I will plead your case with all the passion I can muster. When I speak of Nantes and its generous inhabitants, my voice will be heard favorably, and you will receive the justice you deserve. Rest assured about the effect of the atrocious slander hurled against me; I have nothing to say against its authors, for they have silenced me. But the government will soon pronounce its verdict on them and me. You can count on the virtue of its justice. Fouché

Paris, 3 Thermidor Our poor little girl is still in a worrying state; however, we remain hopeful. We will save her with care and patience. I have nothing new to tell you about my case, which has become the cause of all patriots since it became clear that those with ambition for power are declaring war on my virtue, which cannot be swayed. Just a few more days, then truth and justice will know a resounding triumph. […]

[I am not translating the rest of the letter, which refers to a matter concerning a maid whom Fouché has decided not to keep in his service because her morals do not suit him]

The third letter is probably addressed Fouché's brother-in-law, his sister's husband, and is the most explicit: