The Gazette accords her no Christian name. It designates her merely as Lamberties, wife of Villemain, ex-countess, presenting her first and foremost by the crime of her condition: mistress to the ci-devant Count of Polignac. It is through that name alone that her whole ruin comes to pass.
In 1791, she had assisted two men in fleeing France—the ci-devant Counts of Lamberties, one formerly a colonel in the Normandy Regiment, the other late an officer in the King’s Bodyguard—supplying them with the funds requisite to quit the realm. She had likewise taken charge of one hundred and thirty pieces of silver plate belonging to the Polignacs, depositing them within a closet which she then had walled up.
A wall keeps a secret but poorly in a city given over to domiciliary searches. Early in 1792, an inspection of her residence brought the concealed hoard to light. She, however, pleading that her failing health required her to take the waters, had already quit French soil. She lingered long at Spa, keeping company with the Montmorencys, the Polignacs, the Lamberties, and so vast a throng of other enemies of the Republic—so says the Gazette—that their very names had escaped her own recollection.
What brought her back was neither remorse nor love of country: it was the opening of a collateral inheritance. She was arrested; she was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal.
She confessed to her acquaintances. She confessed, too, to having received in trust, from a person whose name and dwelling were unknown to her, silver bearing the Polignac coat of arms; she had subsequently agreed to acquire it on her own account, paying three thousand livres to this stranger. The jurors found established beyond doubt the intrigues carried on in 1791 and 1792 with the Polignacs and the Lamberties, pronouncing her convicted as principal or accomplice. The Tribunal condemned her to death and declared her property forfeit to the nation. The judgment bears the date of 7 Germinal, Year II.
One would wish to know what this inheritance was, and what fortune it promised, that a woman returning from Spa should dare claim it in the Paris of the Year II. The Gazette does not say. Nor does it reveal who the stranger of the three thousand livres might have been. There remains only a walled-up closet, an inheritance, and a woman who returned to France for the one, only to find the other.
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, Year II (1794), Revolutionary Criminal Tribunal, judgment of 7 Germinal, Year II.