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queens in history
The Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont
(1728-1810) is usually
described as a transvestite spy
who worked for the Empress
Elizabeth of Russia and Louis XV.
D’Eon was a cause célèbre who has become the subject of
numerous popular novels and works of history, as well as an
opera and a Japanese cartoon. The main fascination is that
d’Eon was a successful soldier and diplomat, and an expert
fencer, who while living in London in the 1770s announced
that he was really a she: d’Eon then lived as a woman, in
women’s clothes, for the rest of his life. Only after his death
was it discovered that she was really a he after all.
Because so many of d’Eon’s contemporaries seem to have
been convinced that he was a woman, it is tempting to
think of him as a very convincing transvestite. Yet many of
his friends had some doubts as to his real sex. The bitchy
Horace Walpole attended a dinner party with d’Eon – imagine
the banter once the wine started to flow! – and afterwards
Walpole wrote that he found d’Eon to be ‘loud, noisy and
vulgar… the night was hot and she had no muff or gloves,
and her hands and arms seemed not to have participated
of the change of sexes, but are fitter to carry a chair than
a fan’. Many others dined with d’Eon, including Tom Paine,
and it was often noted that d’Eon drank, swore and acted
like a soldier, and was chivalrous to the ladies: hardly the
sort of feminine behaviour that was expected of women in
eighteenth-century drawing rooms! On the other hand, when
in France d’Eon was received at Versailles by the young Louis
XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette: indeed, the queen even
arranged for d’Eon to be dressed by her fashionista
Rose Bertin. Piecing all the evidence together
though, it appears that d’Eon was a middle-aged
soldier who donned female attire and then carried
on behaving like a man. He was no Dana International,
more like Les Dawson in drag.
So why did he ‘change sex’ half way through his long
life? The usual answer is that while spying in London for
Louis XV he fell out with the French government and
feared that he would be kidnapped or even assassinated.
These were realistic anxieties, and so d’Eon announced
his spectacular news and then started appearing as a
woman in public so as to turn himself into a notoriety and
raise his profile and become untouchable. But this bluff
soldier must have had a predisposition to cross dressing
as there are many other ways of becoming well-known.
Surprisingly for a Frenchman and a Catholic, d’Eon was
very popular in London and once the French Revolution
brought an end to his pension he survived by giving fencing
demonstrations.
By 1810 d’Eon was old and penniless and shared a bedsit
and a bed with an octogenarian Admiral’s widow called
Mrs Cole. After d’Eon died it was Mrs Cole who washed his
corpse and made the startling discovery that her spinster
soul mate was really a man! D’Eon was buried in the
beige 27
Old St Pancras Churchyard, but along with many others, his
grave disappeared in the 1860s when the Midland Railway
expanded its tracks. Although there is no evidence that d’Eon
was homosexual – throughout his life he claimed to be a
virgin – his outrageous story and billowing skirts make him
ideal for this column!
Dr Stephen Brogan
Further reading:
Cynthia Cox, The Enigma of the Age (1966)
Gary Kates, Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman (1997)
Simon Burrows, Jonathan Conlin, Russell Goulbourne
and Valerie Mainz (eds), The Chevalier d’Eon and
His Worlds (2010)