Marie-Thérèse Figueur (Talmay, 17 January 1774 – Paris, hospice des Petits Ménages, 4 January 1861), known by the nom de guerre Sans-Gêne (literally "unconstrained"), was a French soldier who fought in the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. Unlike some female soldiers before the twentieth century, she did not disguise her gender when she enlisted, serving for twenty-two years under her own name in the French Revolutionary Army and the Grande Armée. Upbringing and enlistment (1774–1793) According to her memoirs, Marie-Thérèse Figueur was born in Talmay, near Dijon, the daughter of François Figueur, a miller and merchant, and Claudine Viard, from a family of minor nobility; orphaned at nine years of age, she was entrusted to a maternal uncle, Jean Viard, a sous-lieutenant in an infantry regiment. By her own account, she was not initially a supporter of the French Revolution; her uncle was a firm, if discreet, royalist, and she feared her best friend, a drummer-boy in the Swiss Guard, had been killed during the overthrow of the monarchy, when the National Guard stormed the Tuileries Palace. She joined the counter-revolutionary Federalist uprising in 1793, in a unit of volunteer artillery led by her uncle, now a captain. 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. Quickly earning the nickname le petit Sans-Gêne, she saw her first real battle at the siege of Toulon, where she was wounded for the first time, and first met Napoleon, then a young artillery commander. A Dragoon of the Republic (1793–1800) After the siege, her unit was reorganized in the amalgamation of the 15th Dragoon Regiment, based at Castres. There she learnt horsemanship and formation maneuvers, and the use of firearms and the sword. She also adopted the severe powdered queue hairstyle of a professional soldier, although she stood out due to her short stature, under five French feet in her riding-boots (around 5 feet 4 inches or 160 cm). The regiment was soon assigned to the Army of the Eastern Pyrenees for the campaign of 1793–94, where she saved the life of the grievously-wounded General Noguès, had two horses shot from under her, and refused a promotion to corporal. At this point, although she does not mention it in her memoirs, she appears to have