Therese and Dubois’s relationship

Therese and Dubois’s relationship is a troubled alliance forged under threat. Dubois saves Therese from a death sentence by arranging a prison escape, but treats that rescue as an opening to recruit her into crime. Therese acknowledges her debt and briefly agrees to remain with the band when its members threaten her, yet she never accepts Dubois’s view that criminality is justified. The relationship joins genuine dependence to coercion, and makes the difference between being rescued and being free one of the central questions of their encounter.

The Rescue and the Debt It Creates

Therese first encounters Dubois in the Conciergerie, where both women are awaiting execution. Therese has been convicted after her employer, Monsieur du Harpin, planted a stolen diamond in her mattress and accused her of theft. The court refuses to credit her account that the accusation was revenge for her rejection of his attempt to draw her into a crime. For Therese, the injustice is not merely a false charge: refusing wrongdoing has left her facing death, while the powerful accuser’s standing has made his version appear self-evident.

Dubois takes an interest in Therese, but the interest is bound up with a plan to make her a recruit. Two days before their scheduled executions, Dubois tells her that the Conciergerie will be set on fire and that four of her confederates will help them escape. The fire kills twenty-one people. Therese escapes with Dubois and the others, reaching the cottage of a poacher in the Forest of Bondy. The means of rescue confirm Therese’s sense that Providence has allowed crime to shield her from an unjust fate, but Dubois draws the opposite practical lesson: she presents the escape as proof that virtue brings disaster and crime offers a route to security.

Competing Accounts of Virtue and Necessity

At the cottage, Dubois urges Therese to give up virtue and promises that, if she follows her advice, she can lead her to a fortune within two years. She argues that the poor are driven toward crime by the callousness of the rich, and that wrongdoing can restore a balance disturbed by social inequality. Her reasoning recasts criminal recruitment as both self-preservation and redress: those who have been denied support, she contends, should not be expected to endure hardship without resistance.

Therese listens closely enough to admit that Dubois’s persuasions shake her, but she refuses their conclusion. She grounds that refusal in religious conviction and the hope of compensation in another world. To her, participation in crime would destroy the inward consolation that sustains her through suffering. The disagreement is thus not a simple contest between an untroubled innocent and a persuasive villain. Dubois speaks from the apparent evidence of Therese’s own experience—her virtue has not protected her—while Therese continues to distinguish survival from moral permission.

Protection Becomes Coercion

The precarious bargain changes when Dubois’s four companions learn that Therese will not freely join the gang. They decide that if she cannot be made an accomplice, she will become their victim; they threaten her and invoke the prospect of killing her to keep their secret. Therese begs Dubois to protect her. Dubois laughs at her distress, then offers a reprieve on condition that Therese join the gang and take part in its deeds without objection.

With immediate danger closing in, Therese promises to go wherever Dubois goes if Dubois will shield her from the men. Dubois announces that Therese is now part of the company and tells the bandits not to harm her, presenting her youth and appearance as assets to exploit. The protection is real in the limited sense that Dubois intervenes on Therese’s behalf, but it is neither unconditional nor secure: it makes her safety dependent on joining the criminals, and Dubois’s authority cannot fully restrain their intentions. Therese’s consent is given under a threat she cannot safely refuse, not as a conversion to the principles Dubois advocates.

A Relationship Defined by Dependence and Conflict

The escape establishes Dubois as both benefactor and recruiter. Therese recognizes that Dubois has saved her life and does not deny the obligation; at the same time, she condemns the crime through which the rescue was accomplished and maintains her commitment to virtue. The two women therefore attach different meanings to the same event. Dubois treats it as practical proof that crime can succeed where virtue fails. Therese sees it as an extraordinary deliverance that does not make criminal action acceptable.

Their alliance is consequently unstable from its beginning. Dubois offers direction and protection, but the offer is entangled with a demand that Therese become useful to the gang. Therese accepts proximity to Dubois as the less immediate danger, while keeping her moral allegiance elsewhere. The relationship is not a lasting friendship or a shared criminal partnership: it is a forced dependence created by imprisonment, a violent escape, and the gang’s threat. Its significance lies in the gap between rescue and liberation. Dubois can remove Therese from one sentence of death, yet her intervention places Therese in another system of danger and dependence.