Married to an officer in the Sardinian army, de Bellegarde fled Savoy at the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, but returned at the end of the year to protect her family property from confiscation.

"[2] Adélaïde Victoire Noyel de Bellegarde was born on 24 June 1772 in Chambéry,[3] the former capital of the Duchy of Savoy and its largest city on the French side of the Alps.

Adèle was the elder daughter of Robert-Eugène-François Noyel de Bellegarde, Marquis des Marches and a general in the army of the Dutch Estates.

Friedrich de Bellegarde, now a lieutenant-colonel in Sardinian service, was given command of the area around Chambéry, while the Château des Marches was fortified, garrisoned and equipped with cannon.

[17] In early September, Friedrich ordered Adèle and Aurore to leave for Piedmont, to which most of the Savoyard nobility not involved in the military preparation were already in the process of evacuating.

[21] On the night of 21–22 September, French troops under the Marquis de Montesquiou, led by a unit of Savoyard expatriates known as the Légion des Allobroges, entered Savoy, which was abandoned without resistance by the Sardinian army.

[22] By 4 October, the French were in total control:[23] the advancing Montesquiou wrote from Chambéry that "the tricolore cockade is displayed everywhere",[24] and modern historians have noted the apparent enthusiasm of the Savoyard public for annexation by France.

[30] Following the annexation of Savoy, the National Assembly sent a delegation of four commissioners to organise the new administrative Département de Mont-Blanc, which would be centred upon Chambéry.

[33] The delegates arrived on 14 December alongside the general François Christophe de Kellermann,[33] who replaced Montesquiou as commander of the French Army of the Alps and established his headquarters in Chambéry.

[32] The de Bellegarde sisters, perhaps aware of the dangers of being labelled as "aristocrats",[43] hosted parties and gatherings for revolutionary leaders in both their hôtel and at their château.

[44] On 18 May 1793, de Séchelles and Simond, whose zealous application of revolutionary law had made them widely despised in Savoy,[45] left for Paris, accompanied by Adèle and Aurore.

[55] At some point in the same year, they purchased a château in Chenoise, which had previously been the home of their mother's family but had been confiscated after their uncle, Louis Charles d'Hervilly, fled France as an émigré.

[56] The sisters became closely acquainted with the aristocrat and artist Pulchérie de Valence [Wikidata], then known as "citizen Brûlart", and other members of Parisian high society.

[58] The three women also formed a close friendship with Rouget de Lisle, the composer of La Marseillaise, with whom they dined frequently and to whom Adèle wrote several letters.

[62] Along with other so-called "Dantonists", de Séchelles was arrested on 16 March 1794[63] and imprisoned in the Luxembourg Palace alongside Philibert Simond, who was taken there on the same day.

[32] During this period, which seems to have been fairly comfortable,[65] they met and befriended other aristocratic women imprisoned alongside them, including their long-term friend Aimée de Coigny.

[74] They were prominent in salon culture, and frequently called on exclusive and fashionable hostesses such as Thérésa Tallien, Germaine de Staël and the future empress Josephine Beauharnais.

[75] They hosted notables such as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, Kellerman and Alexandre — all of whom, as Adèle complained in a letter to de Lisle, she found excruciatingly boring.

[87] During Napoleon's brief return to power during the Hundred Days in 1815, the Château des Marches was the headquarters of Colonel Pierre Marin Durand[89] of the 11e Régiment de Ligne [fr], one of the few officers in the south-east to remain loyal to the royalist government in Paris.

[82] While there, they met Alphonse de Lamartine, who would become famous in the 1820s as a poet,[90] and interceded on his behalf in a quarrel with a Bernese officer, who had spoken in praise of Napoleon.

[82] Frequent visitors included Talleyrand, the Dukes of Polignac and Louis Henri, Prince of Condé,[92] who maintained a set of hunting equipment there.

[88] A regular caller at their house was the royalist political theorist turned priest Antoine Eugène Genoud,[94] who mentioned the de Bellegarde sisters in his memoirs[88] and acted as a tutor to Adèle's son Louis.

[88] After her death, Aurore placed a stone in the churchyard with an inscription in Adèle's memory and the words "priez pour celle qui vous aimait" ("pray for her that loved you"), but the location of her tomb is unknown.

[105] According to Delécluze, however, it was Adèle's long, dark hair that most interested him: at the time, he had already painted the crouching figure next to Hersitia (which had been completed by October 1796),[1] and expressed regret that he had not had de Bellegarde's face as a model from which to do so.

[104] The Intervention of the Sabine Women was first exhibited at the Louvre on 21 December 1799,[109] a few weeks after the Coup of 18 Brumaire,[110] in what has been described as "the major artistic event of the late 1790s in Paris.

"[111] Contemporaries recorded that Adèle and Aurore de Bellegarde attended the Paris Opera on the opening night of the exhibition, with their clothing and hair modelled after their appearances in the painting.

[112] The diaphanous gowns worn by their characters were credited for starting a fashion for similar outfits, known as dresses à la antique ("Ancient-style")[113] among Parisian high society.

[52] After the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1796, which established peace between Sardinia and France but confirmed the loss of Savoy,[117] Friedrich moved into the service of Austria, where he was seriously wounded at the Battle of Marengo,[118] but rose to the rank of lieutenant-general and became a chamberlain to Emperor Francis II[92] in Vienna.

In the words of the art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby: In post-Thermidor France, women's visibility seemed not only to flaunt their difference from men but also to constitute the very source of their power and dominance.

In her will of December 1826, Adèle wrote: "I will never in this world be able to repay my sister all that I owe to her … God will reward her for all the good which her generous friendship has done for me, for all her generosity on my account, for her patience and her kindness.