Du Harpin’s framing of Therese for theft is the punishment for her refusal to become his accomplice. By planting a diamond in her room and relying on his standing as an employer, he turns her honest resistance into a criminal charge that a court accepts without seriously weighing her account. The episode establishes a recurring injustice in Therese’s story: the vulnerable are swiftly condemned, while wealth and influence protect those who exploit them.

The refusal and the frame

Therese recounts that Du Harpin had urged her to steal a neighbor’s box, giving her two lock picks and promising an extra crown for two years in return. He defended theft as useful and relatively seldom punished, and invoked examples of societies that honored it as a demonstration of courage and skill. Therese rejected the proposal and challenged him for attempting to corrupt a servant. Du Harpin then claimed that the suggestion had merely been a test, a lie Therese recognized.

Her refusal left her in a perilous position: she had become an enemy to a man whose criminal proposal she could expose. Rather than leave his house, she remained there. More than a month passed without any apparent sign of resentment; Du Harpin waited until the end of her second year in his service before acting against her.

Arrest and conviction

One evening, after Therese had retired to her room, Du Harpin arrived with four watchmen and accused her of stealing a diamond worth a thousand crowns. He insisted that it would be found in her room or on her person. The diamond was discovered in her mattress, and the watchmen seized and imprisoned her. Therese protested that Du Harpin knew she had not stolen it, but his uproar and the planted evidence overwhelmed her denial.

The proceedings moved quickly. Therese says that the lawyer assigned to her had only a brief, formal role, while the court treated her employer’s accusation and the diamond in her room as decisive proof. When she tried to explain that Du Harpin had proposed a theft and was retaliating against her refusal, the court construed her account as an accusation against a supposedly reputable man. His standing counted for more than her testimony.

Poverty, prison, and the larger pattern

Therese presents the conviction as an instance of a justice system that treats poverty itself as evidence of guilt. In her account, an accused person without influence or protection is presumed to have committed the crime that their circumstances supposedly make likely; without money or title to establish innocence, innocence is dismissed as implausible. Her case therefore turns not only on a planted diamond but on the disparity between Du Harpin’s credibility and her own.

Transferred to the Conciergerie, Therese faced the prospect of a capital sentence for a crime she says she did not commit. There she encountered Dubois, who was also awaiting execution and arranged a prison fire as a means of escape. Therese’s account thus links the theft conviction to a further reversal: after legal proceedings fail to hear her defense, her escape from prison depends on another criminal act, not on judicial correction.

Repetition and eventual redress

The false charge anticipates later episodes in which Therese is accused, detained, or threatened with punishment while powerful wrongdoers evade consequences. After the Marquise de Bressac’s death, for example, the Comte de Bressac blamed the absent Therese for poisoning her, and the family left him in possession of the inheritance. Much later, Therese was again convicted on false testimony; Monsieur de Corville intervened, took responsibility for her innocence, and arranged for her custody at his château while seeking official review.

That intervention ultimately brought legal redress unavailable to Therese when Du Harpin first framed her. Royal letters nullified the proceedings against her, restored her standing as an honest citizen, silenced the tribunals that had defamed her, and granted her an annual pension. Yet the officials and influential families implicated in her persecution largely escaped consequences. Set against that outcome, the theft case establishes the story’s central contrast between the force of evidence when wielded by the powerful and the difficulty of making an innocent person’s testimony count.