Thérèse and Dubois

Thérèse and Dubois are bound by a history in which assistance repeatedly becomes leverage. Dubois was associated with Thérèse’s earlier release from the Conciergerie, a debt Thérèse cannot ignore; when they meet again, Dubois invokes that past while offering money, then retaliates when Thérèse prevents her crime. Their relationship exposes the unstable boundary between gratitude and complicity: Thérèse seeks to spare Dubois punishment without allowing her to victimize someone else, while Dubois treats that restraint as betrayal.

Earlier Assistance and Unequal Obligations

After being acquitted in Grenoble, Thérèse encounters Dubois again at an inn. Dubois recognizes her as the person she had saved from the Conciergerie ten years earlier and reminds her of their connection. Thérèse is not pleased to be recognized, but responds politely; Dubois overwhelms her with attention and says that she and the town would have intervened with the magistrates had she known Thérèse’s identity sooner. The encounter renews a debt that shapes Thérèse’s choices, even though Dubois’s professed concern does not prove dependable.

Dubois tells Thérèse that she has made her fortune and that everything she owns is at Thérèse’s disposal. She displays caskets filled with gold and diamonds, presenting the wealth as the product of her own methods and contrasting her prosperity with Thérèse’s devotion to virtue. Her offer of intimacy and material help thus arrives alongside a direct attempt to persuade Thérèse to adopt her outlook. Dubois argues that virtue and vice are merely different ways of making one’s way in the world, and that a person should choose according to the prevailing character of society. Her generosity is inseparable from recruitment: she wants Thérèse’s allegiance as well as her company.

The Proposed Theft and Thérèse’s Resistance

Dubois asks Thérèse to help rob Dubreuil, a Lyon tradesman staying at the inn, who has a small coffer containing eight hundred thousand francs. Her plan is to have Thérèse accompany him on a drive and keep him away while Dubois steals the money. Dubois offers Thérèse a thousand louis, later giving her a note for twenty thousand crowns. Thérèse outwardly agrees, but intends to warn Dubreuil. She is unwilling both to participate in the theft and to expose Dubois to punishment, because she remembers owing her freedom to her.

At the arranged outing, Thérèse takes Dubreuil aside before they leave and urges him to place a trusted associate in his room. She then tells him that Dubois intends to rob him. Once they are in the carriage, she explains the scheme and her own difficult history. Dubreuil responds with gratitude and offers to marry her, proposing that she accompany him to Geneva. Thérèse’s attempt to prevent one crime without betraying her former benefactor briefly opens a possibility of security and a life beyond destitution.

That possibility is abruptly overturned. Dubreuil becomes seriously ill on the journey back, and a doctor confirms that he has been poisoned. Dubois has left for Turin; Thérèse also finds that her own small amount of money and possessions have been taken. The narrative presents Dubois as the likely author of both the poisoning and the theft: an occupied room had frustrated her plan, and the poisoning could have distracted Dubreuil from pursuing her escape. Thérèse is not allowed to approach him as he dies, but Dubreuil explicitly exonerates her and forbids that she be pursued. His death destroys the marriage prospect, while Dubois’s theft returns Thérèse to poverty.

From Retaliation to Abduction

Thérèse’s failure to assist Dubois’s crime does not end their association. After Dubreuil’s death, Thérèse receives help from Valbois, who arranges for her needs to be met and asks Madame Bertrand to accompany her. Later, while Thérèse walks beside the Isere, three men seize her, silence her, and carry her in a closed carriage for three hours to a guarded house. They offer no explanation during the journey. Once inside, one tells her that she is about to see an old acquaintance.

The acquaintance is Dubois, who appears with a candle and confronts Thérèse in anger. She calls the abduction a punishment for the virtues Thérèse exercised at her expense and accuses her of betrayal. Thérèse denies having directly informed against her, but Dubois defines opposition to the planned crime as an offense in itself: Thérèse thwarted its execution, and Dubois says she must be chastened. The contrast is central to their relationship. Thérèse understands loyalty as a reason to avoid bringing Dubois to justice; Dubois demands that loyalty take the form of obedience.

Betrayal and Narrative Significance

Dubois presents Thérèse to Monseigneur as the young woman whose innocence and virtue had secured her release from a sentence of death. She has brought Thérèse to him after he had expressed a desire to possess her, turning the very reputation that might have protected Thérèse into part of the inducement. The earlier rescue and the later abduction therefore form a stark reversal: Dubois’s past help does not lead to lasting protection, but becomes a claim she uses while delivering Thérèse into danger.

The relationship also clarifies why Thérèse’s gratitude cannot be reduced to simple trust. She tries to prevent Dubois from committing a robbery without reporting her, but Dubois answers that moral restraint with theft, poisoning, and renewed coercion. In the novel’s larger sequence of repeated captivity and false accusation, this episode makes assistance itself precarious: the person who once helped Thérèse escape can later exploit the obligation that help created. Their bond is not reconciled; it ends, in the evidence presented here, with Dubois exercising control over Thérèse and treating virtue as grounds for retaliation.