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Who was The Chevalier d'Éon?

The Chevalier d'Éon was regarded as the greatest woman fencer of the 18th century; but this was 200 years before Olympic gender testing and 'she' was always a 'he'. In fact, the Chevalier spent the first 46 years of his life primarily as a man, regularly cross-dressing for fun, and the last 35 living entirely as a woman. This was more than transvestism since there’s no doubt that the mature d’Eon had voluptuous breasts. They are there for all to see in a portrait by Maurice de La Tour, but even if we suspect the painter’s potential for artistic licence, there’s the starker reality of the elderly d’Eon’s well-documented mastectomy to neutralise a mammary tumour, caused by the thrust of a foil.

The Chevalier d'Éon was involved in one of the most celebrated fencing bouts of all time: an exhibition match against the Chevalier de Saint-Georges before the Prince of Wales at Carlton House in 1787. The contest is captured in a caricature by Gillray and features as a scene in Eonnagata, where the weapons are represented by a wooden stick for d’Eon against his opponent’s metal hoop.

At 59, d'Éon was 20 years older than Saint-Georges. She also fought in women’s clothing - triple skirts and hoops - against a fitter man dressed in white fencing gear with tight breeches. It was a complete mismatch, as evidenced in this contemporary account:

‘Walking slowly, apparently with difficulty, there appeared…a little frail old lady in a rusty black satin gown and white lace bonnet. The only touches of colour about the whole amazing little person were the vivid blue of two unfaded, arrogant eyes in the white, shrivelled face, and the flame color of a bit of ribbon on the black dress, over the left breast.’ (Quoted in Homberg – ‘d’Eon de Beaumont’. 1911)

This ‘frail old lady’ slaughtered the tall, younger man, winning the match by seven hits to one. The Chevalier d'Éon, hounded by debt and having sold almost everything she owned, continued to fence, winning another tournament six years later before embarking on a nationwide tour that was prematurely interrupted when her opponent’s blade broke and entered d’Eon’s right armpit. The wound became infected and confined the 68 year-old to bed for several months. The Chevalier announced (as quoted in Eonnagata) that henceforth the sword would be confined to cutting her bread.

Why did the Chevalier d'Éon cross genders?
The simple truth is that no-one knows. There’s no evidence of any kind of a sexual or intimate relationship. Contemporary accounts reveal a tall, slender youth with fine light-blonde hair, a ‘rose-and-white’ complexion, curved mouth and large luminous eyes (features reflected in the much later portrait by de La Tour of d’Eon as a woman). Although ‘dainty in his manner’ d’Eon was evidently capable of being one of the boys – his drinking, gambling and general ribaldry was well documented, albeit without any associated womanising.

The Chevalier in London
d'Éon was part of the French Secret Service and the first evidence of his cross-dressing came in the service of Louis XV. Aged 27, he infiltrated the Court of St Petersburg in the guise of Mademoiselle Lia de Beaumont, gaining valuable information for France. As a Lady-in-Waiting to the Czarina, d’Eon encouraged her Francophile sympathies, thus thwarting a possible treaty with England. But when d'Éon went back to Russia the following year, it was as a very male captain of the dragoons who had fought bravely in the Rhine campaign.

In 1762, he came to London - as a Secretary to the French Ambassador - to negotiate terms for ending the Seven Years’ War and this was to be d'Éon's home for much of the rest of his life. A political battle with another Burgundian – the Compte de Guerchy – marked the start of rumours about his gender, circulated by de Guerchy and his supporters. The Compte was soon disgraced by being implicated in a plot to assassinate d’Eon and took his own life.

A Russian Princess arriving in London reported that she had seen d'Éon living as a woman in St Petersburg; newspapers declared that he must be a hermaphrodite and mocked his effeminacy; and even the London Stock Exchange quoted odds on his gender at the height of the scandal. d'Éon stayed silent throughout this, doing nothing to set the record straight. It could just have been bloody-mindedness that set him on the course of remaining as a woman for the last three decades of his life. Another plausible reason was that many people had cause to challenge him to a duel, not least de Guerchy’s son. It’s unlikely that d'Éon would have been defeated with a sword, but he had refuge in the fact that no-one could have sought a duel with a woman. The matter seemed eventually closed, after years of silence, when d'Éon finally declared, in 1775, that she was female and undertook to live exclusively as a woman from then on. It’s likely that this confession may have been solicited to prevent any further assassination attempts by the French Court.

One final and rather charming irony came when d'Éon met Casanova, perhaps history’s finest connoisseur of women. This didn’t prevent him from also falling under the Chevalier’s spell. Casanova declared d'Éon to be “une belle femme” on the grounds that ‘his voice is too clear for that of a castrato and the shape too rounded for a man’. (Bleakley – ‘Casanova in England’. 1923).

Epilogue
After the Chevalier’s death in 1810, at the age of 81, none other than Queen Charlotte tried to ensure that the mystery of his sex died with the Chevalier, but the men she entrusted with keeping his cadaver safe, couldn’t restrain their curiosity or greed and sold it to the surgeons. The conclusion of Eonnagata shows the final dénouement of this intriguing life story with the ignominy of an autopsy by the celebrated medical Friar, Père Elysée, settling conclusively that d'Éon was anatomically a man; news that deeply shocked a Mrs Cole, with whom he had lived for the last 14 years of his life!  What a pity that the Chevalier’s secret couldn’t go with her into the grave.

Graham Watts

A longer version of this article appears in the programme for Eonnagata.

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Sadler's Wells Theatre

23 - 27 Jun 2009