Therese was allowed to state her origin in Montalgi

The Montargis encounter turns Therese from a condemned, guarded traveler into the witness whose life story occupies the novel’s central frame. Madame de Lorsange and Monsieur de Corville pause at an inn after a walk beyond their estate and see Therese arrive bound in the custody of mounted constables, accused of murder, theft, and arson. Their decision to hear her account opens the book’s extended testimony, while its eventual disclosure of her identity joins that testimony to the sisters’ reunion and a possible rescue.

The Encounter at the Inn

Madame de Lorsange and Monsieur de Corville have been living together for four years as if married. A recently acquired property near Montargis has brought them to Bourbonnais; one evening, tired from walking toward Montargis, they stop at the inn where the coach from Lyon calls, intending to send for a carriage. From a room looking onto the courtyard, they watch the coach’s passengers descend. Therese is carried down by the guards, dressed in a worn jacket and covered by a dark mantle, bound hand and foot and too weak to stand without support.

Madame de Lorsange reacts with surprise and horror at the sight. She and Monsieur de Corville approach the constables and ask what Therese has done. The guards report that she is accused of murder, theft, and arson, while one admits reluctance to escort someone who seems gentle and honest. The accusation is especially grave because Therese has been tried at Lyon and is being taken to Paris for confirmation of the sentence before she is returned to Lyon for execution.

From Prisoner to Narrator

Madame de Lorsange wants to hear Therese’s account directly, and Monsieur de Corville shares her wish. After he identifies himself and offers to take responsibility for the prisoner, the guards agree to remain overnight in Montargis. Therese is unbound, given food, and treated with kindness. The change in circumstance is immediate but provisional: she is no longer physically bound in the room, yet the sentence and the journey toward its confirmation still hang over her.

Once Therese has recovered somewhat, Madame de Lorsange asks how she came to such a dreadful position. Therese hesitates, describing her story as an example of innocence oppressed and expressing anxiety that recounting it may amount to a complaint against Heaven’s will. She then begins at the beginning, asking to conceal her name and birth. She says she was born in Paris, lost her parents while young, and spent the small inheritance they left her while trying to find a suitable position. Her account begins with the poverty and lack of support that marked her early misfortunes, and proceeds into her first encounter with Dubourg, a wealthy Parisian tradesman to whom she had been directed for help.

The frame gives the long retrospective its particular force: Therese does not speak from safety, but while under sentence and in the custody of the authorities. The people hearing her are not neutral spectators. Their sympathy creates the conditions for her story to be told, while the facts she recounts must contend with the judicial verdict already attached to her. In this way, the episode establishes a contrast between a vulnerable person’s testimony and the legal process that has classified her as a criminal.

Testimony Against the Libertine Argument

Therese’s account includes not only the sequence of her misfortunes but also arguments over how to live amid them. Dubois urges her to set aside religious belief and argues that the wealthy’s indifference makes the poor person’s crimes understandable; Therese rejects this reasoning, insisting that she would rather endure the dangers of virtue than participate in crime. Their exchange brings the novel’s moral conflict into the testimony itself: hardship is made the occasion for a dispute about Providence, poverty, law, and self-interest.

A later crisis sharpens that dispute when the Comte de Bressac tells Therese that he has resolved to kill his aunt and wants to use her hand to carry out the plan. Therese refuses. He attempts to persuade her that killing does not truly destroy matter, since Nature merely changes its forms, but his reasoning does not overcome her refusal. Her recollection presents libertine philosophy not as detached speculation but as an argument pressed upon someone vulnerable, with a concrete crime as its proposed conclusion.

After Therese escapes, she tries to recover her belongings and the money she had earned while serving the Marquise de Bressac. She has only six louis with her, while more than forty remain at the château. She sends a peasant girl named Jeannette with a letter, concealing her own location and asking for her clothes and money. Jeannette returns with news that the Marquise has died, that the Comte has blamed a fleeing chambermaid for poisoning her, and that the inheritance has made him far wealthier. This episode underscores the distance between Therese’s account of an attempted murder and the public story that leaves the Comte in possession of his inheritance.

Recognition and Intervention

Therese’s narrative finally changes the meaning of the encounter for its listeners. Monsieur de Corville is deeply moved; Madame de Lorsange, whose past crimes have not extinguished her capacity for feeling, is overwhelmed by sympathy. She recognizes in the prisoner the sister she had lost and asks whether the young woman is Therese—Justine, her sister. Therese recognizes Juliette in turn, and the sisters embrace, their sobs interrupting their speech. What had begun as a request for the prisoner’s story becomes a recognition of kinship, linking the two women’s separate histories at the inn.

Monsieur de Corville responds with action. He writes to the Lord Chancellor, assumes responsibility for Therese’s innocence, and asks that she be held at his château until the case is clarified. He makes himself answerable for her to the guards, who entrust her to his care, and a carriage is called. Madame de Lorsange urges Therese to go with the protector who, unlike those who had abandoned her, will not leave her unsupported. The intervention does not itself constitute a final legal judgment, but it breaks the immediate chain of custody leading toward execution and opens a route to review.

Narrative and Moral Significance

The episode establishes a layered structure of testimony: the outer narrative presents the meeting and its listeners’ responses, while Therese’s first-person account supplies the extended history they—and the reader—must assess. Her changing status at Montargis, from bound prisoner to unbound storyteller and then to a person entrusted to Monsieur de Corville, makes the act of listening consequential rather than merely explanatory. The story is heard by people whose responses can alter her circumstances.

The novel’s prefatory statement announces an unusual design: instead of the customary victory of virtue and punishment of vice, it proposes to show vice triumphant and virtue made to suffer. At Montargis, that design is embodied in the disparity between Therese’s apparent innocence and the sentence carried against her, and in the contrast between the prosperous Madame de Lorsange and the condemned woman who recounts her misfortunes. Yet the sisters’ recognition and Monsieur de Corville’s intervention introduce a counteraction: testimony awakens sympathy, and sympathy becomes practical aid. The closing moral directs readers to see virtue as ultimately worthy of reward in Heaven even when it is persecuted on Earth, framing Therese’s ordeal within the work’s stated problem of Providence and suffering.