The Revolution very nearly proved fatal to Mlle. Raucourt. The questions which were agitating the public mind were very far from leaving the national theatre undisturbed. “Even our little green-room,” writes Fleury, “was not exempt from the invasion of the moment. Melpomene and Thalia had the mortification to see their sacred altars profaned by the party pamphlets of the day, their venerated sanctuary converted into a political club.” The house of Molière, in fact, was divided against itself. Mlle. Raucourt, Molé, Fleury, and Louise Contat had tasted too many of the sweets of Court favour not to deplore deeply the fall of the old régime; while, on the other hand, Talma, Madame Vestris, Dugazon, and Mlle. Deschamps espoused the popular side with the fervour of rooted conviction. Of the remainder, the majority were either Royalists or moderate constitutionalists.[123] This divergence of political opinion soon led to angry recriminations and thence to an open rupture, and, in the spring of 1791, Talma and his friends, finding their position growing intolerable, withdrew from the company, to found, at the Palais-Royal, the Théâtre-Français de la Rue de Richelieu, which, in the following year, became the Théâtre de la République. Having purged itself of its Republican members, the Comédie threw itself boldly into the political strife, and, throughout the terrible winter of 1792-93, allowed no opportunity to slip of advocating the restoration of order and security. On January 3, 1793, during the King’s trial, it produced a play, by Jean Laya, entitled _Les Amis des Lois_, in which Robespierre (under the name of Nomophage), Marat, and other Montagnards were held up to ridicule and odium. How such a play contrived to escape the vigilance of the Republican censors is not easy to understand, since so thinly veiled were the allusions that almost every passage was punctuated by the cheers and hooting of an excited audience. It was, of course, speedily suppressed, and from that moment the doings of the Comédie were closely watched by the sanguinary faction now rising to supremacy in the State, which only awaited an opportunity of closing the theatre and arraigning the whole company before the Revolutionary Court. An adaptation of “Pamela,” by François de Neufchâteau, afterwards Minister of the Interior, which contained not a little material calculated to awaken regret for the proscribed nobility, provided the Jacobins with the pretext they desired, and, on September 3, the whole of the players, with the exception of Molé, who had contrived to effect his escape, and Des Essarts, who was taking the waters at Baréges, were arrested and conveyed to the Madelonettes, in the Quartier Saint-Martin-des-Champs, and Sainte-Pélagie, in the Rue de la Clef; the men being assigned to the former prison and the women to the latter.