Therese and Father Antonin’s perpetrator-victim relationship

Therese and Father Antonin’s perpetrator-victim relationship is a recurring pattern of clerical betrayal: Antonin first encounters her as a fugitive from the monastery, then later exploits her arrest and desperation, assaults her, and disowns her when she seeks help. The relationship makes the gap between religious authority and actual protection brutally consequential; at each return, Therese’s need for safety gives Antonin a new means of control.

The Encounter in Lyon

While traveling with Madame Bertrand after leaving Grenoble, Therese walked along the Rhône quay with girls from their hotel and recognized Father Antonin, formerly of Saint Mary-in-the-Wood and now superior of his order’s establishment in Lyon. He rebuked her for escaping and warned that he could inform the Burgundian monastery, making clear that her freedom remained precarious. He then offered not protection but a bargain: he would keep silent if she and her companion visited his new quarters.

Antonin made the proposal openly to both women, promising them payment from the ten men in the house if they agreed. Therese blushed, tried to convince him that he had mistaken her for someone else, and then used gestures to urge him to stop speaking. When he persisted and demanded their address, she gave him a false one to get rid of him. The encounter shows how his position gives a threat the appearance of discretion: he can expose her to recapture, but offers silence only in exchange for access to women he considers available.

Imprisonment and Coercion

After the fire at Villefranche, Therese was taken to Lyon and held on accusations including arson, theft, and the deaths in the inn. Remembering Antonin, she asked to see him, hoping that even limited assistance might help her escape the danger of conviction. He arrived without knowing who had requested him and pretended not to recognize her. Therese explained their earlier encounter to the jailer and arranged a private interview by presenting the request as a matter of confession.

Alone with him, Therese fell at his knees, explained her innocence, and said that her companion’s hostility followed Antonin’s earlier advances. He listened, then described the case as hopeless: Madame Bertrand would accuse her, appearances were against her, and Dubois would work behind the scenes to secure her ruin. Antonin proposed to claim that Therese was his niece and use his influence with the bailiff to intervene. But the promised rescue was a new captivity. He said he would send her to the monastery, where she would never leave, and demand that she submit to him and his colleagues.

Therese refused, saying she would rather die innocent than accept the conditions he imposed. Antonin answered with sarcasm about the rewards of virtue and prepared to leave. When Therese pleaded again, her desperation became another opportunity for him to take advantage of her. He assaulted her while she was in custody, then made his supposed aid conditional on her silence. The episode turns the confessor’s room into an extension of the prison: the person approached as a possible advocate uses the prisoner’s dependence to commit further harm.

Denial and Threats

After the assault, Antonin warned Therese that if she spoke, he would accuse her of still more serious crimes and destroy any chance she had to defend herself. He invoked his standing as a confessor, claiming that he was permitted to reveal information when a person was accused of crime, and ordered her to support his account. When the jailer entered, Antonin said he had never seen her, identified the Father Antonin she sought as someone now in Bordeaux, and represented himself as a stranger who had merely heard her confession.

Therese was left bewildered by his fraudulence and revolted by the contrast between his religious ministry and his conduct. His denial did not simply conceal the assault: it deprived her of a witness who might have helped her and placed his authority behind a false account. The scene extends her larger experience of wrongful accusation, in which those able to influence the law can turn appearances against her while she struggles to make her testimony count.

A Repeated Failure of Protection

Antonin’s first encounter with Therese establishes that her escape remains vulnerable to religious authorities who can threaten to return her to the monastery. Later, when she is in prison and urgently needs help, he converts that vulnerability into an explicit demand for submission, then uses the same institutional standing that seemed to offer rescue to intimidate her into silence. The relationship therefore develops through reversal: the hoped-for protector becomes an assailant, and the confessor who hears her plea denies that he knows her.

Therese’s account of these events is part of the testimony she gives before Monsieur de Corville and Madame de Lorsange. They hear the accumulated record of her misfortunes with profound emotion; Madame de Lorsange’s response leads to the recognition that Therese is her sister Justine, while Monsieur de Corville acts to protect her and seek her release. That later intervention sharply contrasts with Antonin’s conduct. Where he makes assistance a means of domination and concealment, Corville accepts responsibility for her innocence and uses his influence to secure protection.