Thérèse tries to rescue Bertrand’s baby from the fire

Thérèse’s attempt to rescue Bertrand’s baby during the Villefranche inn fire is an act of compassion that becomes the occasion for her capture and a false accusation. She returns to the burning building to save a child its mother has failed to protect, but a misstep on a partly consumed beam causes her to lose her hold; Dubois uses the catastrophe to seize Thérèse and, afterward, to portray her as the arsonist and thief.

The Fire and the Rescue Attempt

Thérèse and her traveling companion have been asleep for less than two hours when smoke wakes them. As they leave their room, the fire has already spread through the inn: walls and timbers are collapsing, people are fleeing, and the flames leave no obvious route to safety. In the confusion, Thérèse realizes that her conductress has been more concerned with her own safety than with the baby’s. She turns back without stopping to argue, passes through the fire, and reaches their chamber to retrieve the child.

Carrying the baby, Thérèse tries to return it to its mother by crossing a partly burned beam. She misses her footing and instinctively puts out her hands; in doing so, she releases the child, which falls into the fire. The rescue attempt thus ends in an irreversible loss rather than safety. The narrative establishes that Thérèse meant to save the baby, while the physical circumstances of escape make the failure a consequence of the fire and her misstep.

Capture in the Aftermath

Thérèse is seized in the disorder before she can understand whether those surrounding her mean to help or harm her. She discovers the answer only after being forced into a post chaise beside Dubois, who threatens her into silence. The fire therefore serves two different purposes in the episode: it creates the immediate danger from which Thérèse tries to save the child, and it gives Dubois the confusion in which to recapture her.

Dubois later admits that the fire was deliberate. She says that she had the inn burned by people in her employ because she wanted either to kill Thérèse or take her back. She had tracked her from Lyon to Villefranche and explains that Monseigneur had been angered by Thérèse’s escape. Her account also identifies a financial incentive: she expects payment for each girl she procures for him. Thérèse’s compassionate return to the burning building and her subsequent capture are thus caught in a trap deliberately set by Dubois.

The Rescue Turned into an Accusation

After the fire, Dubois presents herself to the authorities not as Thérèse’s captor but as a respectable benefactor. She claims that Thérèse approached her after losing everything, asked for a ride to Lyon, and offered to serve her. She says she agreed out of pity, then publicly disavows Thérèse and calls for the law’s harshest penalties. The invented account reverses their roles: the woman who arranged the fire and seized Thérèse poses as her rescuer, while Thérèse is made to appear dangerous and ungrateful.

Dubois’s accusations make the failed rescue part of a broader fabricated case. She claims Thérèse set the inn alight to rob her, stole her possessions, and threw the baby into the flames to distract its mother. The actual events contradict that story: Thérèse went back into the fire to retrieve the child, and the child fell when she lost her footing on the beam. But Thérèse’s poverty and lack of protection make her defense difficult to credit against Dubois’s claims of wealth and status. A search of the premises establishes that Thérèse had entered the hayloft where the fire began, though she explains that she had gone there while trying to find a water closet. That circumstance is treated as evidence against her, and her request to be searched for the allegedly stolen money is dismissed with laughter.

Significance

The episode sharply contrasts Thérèse’s conduct with the story told about her. Her instinctive response to a child in danger is to go back into the flames; Dubois turns that same disaster into a means of abduction and a charge of deliberate murder. The failed rescue does not itself prove guilt, but the social imbalance between a poor, unprotected traveler and a wealthy woman’s assumed respectability allows accusation to outweigh Thérèse’s account. The fire marks the transition from an attempted act of care to the machinery of false conviction.