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 , in a unit of volunteer artillery led by her uncle, now a captain.
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 cm.
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 , she married Henri Commarmot, a cavalryman in the 8th Hussars , then forming part of the Dijon garrison in the Army of the Rhine. She was thus a soldier in the Hussars during the invasion of Switzerland. 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 —97 due to serving on garrison duty around Milan, although she does mention her service in Switzerland.
Nonetheless, the records confirm the next section of her narrative: she rejoined the garrison element of the 15th Dragoons when the main body of the regiment was in Egypt, and was reassigned to the 9th Dragoons fighting in Italy.
Captured briefly according to the memoir, seized by Austrian hussars and allowed to escape by French royalists , she was subsequently wounded by four sabre cuts at the Battle of Genola on 4 November , having had another horse shot from under her, and was captured a second time. Eventually, she managed to scramble back to the French lines. The memoir claims that effects of her sabring at Savigliano were exacerbated by subsequent mountain campaigning against Swiss partisans in the snow of the Alps.
