Captured by the forces of the Republican government, she was encouraged to change sides, and on 9 July 1793, the nineteen-year-old girl enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Légion des Allobroges under Colonel Pinon.

[3] At this point, although she does not mention it in her memoirs, she appears to have left the dragoons and returned home; on 27 June 1796, she married Henri Commarmot, a cavalryman in the 8th Hussars, then forming part of the Dijon garrison in the Army of the Rhine.

[5] The memoirs give no hint of the marriage with Commarmot, discharge from the 15th Dragoons, or transfer to the Hussars; she says that she missed Napoleon's iconic victories of 1796–97 due to serving on garrison duty around Milan, although she does mention her service in Switzerland.

[9] The basic outline is confirmed by the appearance of her stipend at St-Cloud in Napoleon's accounts in 1804,[10] and by the eyewitness memoirs of Marbot, which vouch for her role with Augereau, and summarize her previous biography up to her departure from Saint-Cloud.

[12][13] After a falling-out with the Marshal, Figueur returned to active duty; the memoirs claim that she fought with her regiment in the great victories of Ulm, Austerlitz and Jena, and that an accident on the road to Berlin led to a second period of convalescence.

[14] In the early twentieth century, the French researcher Léon Hennet argued that this campaign was largely fabricated by the memoirs' editor, citing records that place Sans-Gêne in Paris until the very end of 1805, and dating her sick-leave to an incident near Linz in February 1806.

[19] In July 1818, she married her old friend Clément Joseph Melchior Sutter, the Swiss drummer-boy whom she believed dead after 10 August 1792, now a senior non-commissioned officer in a prestigious cavalry unit of the royal guard.

[25] In the nineteenth century, she enjoyed enough celebrity for Victorien Sardou to borrow her nom de guerre as the title of his 1893 Théâtre du Vaudeville play Madame Sans Gêne—but he repurposed the nickname for Cathérine Hübscher, the wife of Marshal Lefebvre.

The popularity of the play and subsequent adaptations (a novel, an opera, and a large number of screen versions) somewhat obscured the real Sans-Gêne, but its success also provoked a new edition of her memoirs, and led to favourable comparisons between Marie-Thérèse and Cathérine Hübscher.