Dubois Abducts Therese and Delivers Her to a Nobleman is a reversal in Therese’s account of repeated captivity: after she has escaped one danger, the woman she once helped returns not as an ally but as an avenger, handing her over to a powerful man who regards suffering and death as pleasures. The carriage ride ends in a locked house, where Dubois names Therese’s resistance as her offense and presents her to the nobleman as a coveted victim. By making the rescue-minded listener Madame de Lorsange and the protective Monsieur de Corville hear this history, the frame narrative also places the episode within the testimony that will eventually move them to act.

Background and Occasion

The abduction comes after Therese has intervened against Dubois’s criminal design. Dubois later accuses her of thwarting the crime she was planning; Therese insists that she never betrayed Dubois by speaking against her, but that defense does not alter Dubois’s understanding of the offense. To Dubois, opposition itself warrants punishment. Her revenge thus grows directly from Therese’s refusal to assist wrongdoing, turning a moral choice into the pretext for renewed danger.

By the time she is seized, Therese has also experienced a brief prospect of support. Valbois has asked that she be cared for and set out with Madame Bertrand, and his kindness has stirred her hope that she might find consolation after a long succession of misfortunes. She walks beside the Isère River, absorbed in thought, and night falls before she realizes how far she has gone. The contrast is stark: an offer of humane assistance has just appeared, but she is alone when the next act of violence begins.

Seizure and Delivery

Three men attack Therese in the isolated place. One clamps a hand over her mouth while the other two force her into a carriage; they give no answer to her questions as it travels for three full hours with its blinds drawn. The closed carriage denies her both a view of the route and any knowledge of her destination. When it stops, the men carry her through several dark rooms into a house, shut the doors, and leave her waiting near a lit room with the promise that she will soon see an old acquaintance.

That acquaintance is Dubois, who enters carrying a candle. She addresses Therese arrogantly, calls the encounter a reward for the virtues Therese exercised at her expense, and angrily takes her by the hand. Her words make the logic of revenge explicit: Dubois is not claiming that Therese exposed her, but punishing her for having obstructed a crime. The sudden reunion transforms the apparent mystery of the abductors’ destination into the return of a familiar enemy.

Dubois leads Therese into a magnificently furnished apartment. At its far end, a man of about forty reclines on an ottoman in a loose taffeta dressing gown. Dubois presents him as Monseigneur and identifies Therese as the celebrated young woman whom Grenoble has interested itself in: she had been condemned to hang with counterfeiters, she says, but was delivered because of her innocence and virtue. She also advertises another young woman, a pensionnaire from the Benedictine convent at Lyon, as due to arrive shortly, making clear that Therese is being delivered as one of two intended victims.

The nobleman confirms that Dubois has brought him the person he wanted. He says that less than four days earlier he had strongly desired to have Therese in his power, and Dubois answers that she has now placed her in his hands. She describes Therese as possessing a deep-rooted, sentimental chastity, even while contrasting her with the other girl’s physical and moral integrity. The language of praise is part of the transaction: Therese’s innocence, which has repeatedly failed to protect her, is presented as an added attraction to the man who claims possession of her.

Recognition of the Threat

The nobleman initially speaks as though he can end Therese’s misfortunes within a day. His laughter and his remarks about relieving a young woman’s distress make his promise ominous rather than reassuring. Dubois reinforces the threat by telling him that Therese had been useful in her latest enterprise at Grenoble and asking him to repay what she owes her with interest. Therese cannot know every implication at once, but Dubois’s words, the promised arrival of the second girl, and the man’s manner rapidly clarify what kind of danger she faces.

He calls Therese to him and kisses her, then examines the nape of her neck after lifting her hair. He exclaims over how it is attached and says it will be divine to make it jump free. The anatomical scrutiny turns the menace into a specific threat of decapitation: Therese recognizes that this libertine’s pleasure lies in the agony or death of victims procured for him. Her fear is not a mistaken inference but a recognition of the fate implied by his gesture and words; she understands that she may lose her life.

Narrative Frame and Consequences

The episode reaches the reader as part of Therese’s long first-person account, not as an independently narrated scene. She tells it to Madame de Lorsange and Monsieur de Corville after guards bring her, bound and weakened, through Montargis. Accused of murder, theft, and arson, she is being sent from Lyon to Paris for confirmation of her sentence and then back to Lyon for execution. The listeners have her unbound, give her food, and ask her to recount her troubles. This frame makes the abduction one testimony within a larger effort to understand how an apparently gentle and innocent woman came to stand before them as a condemned prisoner.

Therese’s narration at this point leads into the account of the two figures whose company she says she will share for a while. The nobleman’s household is therefore a new stage in her repeated exposure to coercion, rather than an isolated danger resolved in the scene. Her later explanation of the Grenoble episode and the ensuing events will show how the threat connects to her continuing struggle to escape those who treat her as property or prey.

The listeners’ reaction gives the account consequences beyond the immediate captivity. Monsieur de Corville is deeply moved by what he hears, and Madame de Lorsange is nearly overcome. After Therese completes her story, Madame de Lorsange recognizes her as her lost sister, Justine; Monsieur de Corville then writes to the Lord Chancellor, accepts responsibility for Therese’s innocence, and obtains custody of her at his château while the case is reviewed. The abduction therefore belongs to the chain of testimony that brings the sisters together and prompts a concrete intervention, even though the rescue comes only after Therese has endured the nobleman’s threat.

Significance

The scene concentrates the novel’s recurring reversal of moral expectation. Therese’s virtue is not merely powerless in the face of violence: Dubois makes it the stated reason for punishment, while the nobleman treats innocence and grief as qualities that intensify his appetite. The greater the danger, the more clearly the episode contrasts Therese’s refusal to assist crime with the impunity of those who exploit her.

Its movement from a dark, shuttered carriage to a splendidly furnished room also makes the threat legible through changing surroundings. The journey hides where Therese is being taken; the opulence of the destination does nothing to make it safe. Instead, the grand room supplies a stage on which Dubois can formally transfer her to Monseigneur and the nobleman can turn a gesture of inspection into a declaration of lethal intent. The episode’s danger lies not in uncertainty alone, but in the sudden clarity of what her captors mean to do.