The Chevalier and the Chavelière

Yesterday I described the busy, accomplished life of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a champion swordsman and celebrated musician in pre-Revolutionary France.

In the late 1780s he spent a couple of years in London. And there he encountered an old acquaintance, the Chevalier d’Eon. Reportedly D’Eon had seen Saint-Georges fence as a teenager in Paris.

D’Eon had had an eventful military and diplomatic career before going into exile in Britain in 1760s. Starting in 1777, D’Eon had lived in France full-time as a woman. In 1785 the chevalier returned to London, where people still remembered him as a skilled swordsman.

On 9 Apr 1787, Saint-Georges and D’Eon performed a fencing exhibition in front of George, the Prince of Wales, and his entourage. Charles Jean Robineau painted the scene, and by 1789 it was turned into a print for the popular market. The print’s caption referred to D’Eon as “Mademoiselle La chevalière.”

I’d seen this image in connection with D’Eon, who certainly stands out in dress and bonnet. But Saint-Georges was also a celebrity and, as a man of African ancestry, a curiosity. His dark tan skin is not evident in the print, at least not in some hand-colored examples, but it’s clear in the painting.

How Should We Refer to the Chevalier D’Eon?

Four years ago I reported on art dealer Philip Mould’s identification of a portrait as showing the Chevalier d’Eon.

A French diplomat and spy, D’Eon ran afoul of his own government and took refuge in London. Dressing as a woman while teaching men to fence, D’Eon became a celebrity, eventually claiming to have been a woman all along.

The National Portrait Gallery in London acquired that oil painting to go with its many engravings of D’Eon made for a wider audience. In connection with the display of that portrait, Assistant Curator Claire Barlow recently wrote:

D’Eon’s extraordinary story sparked a debate over the display of the portrait: which pronoun to use? The answer ought to be whichever pronoun D’Eon preferred but here we hit the great problem of working with historical objects – the limitations of surviving evidence. While living as a man, D’Eon had bought women’s clothes for himself but he only began living exclusively as a woman due to external pressure. The French court, convinced by persistent rumours about D’Eon’s gender, only agreed to give him a pension if he wore ‘clothing appropriate to her sex’. This ruling reflects the strict eighteenth-century gender division: ultimately, D’Eon had to choose. He took the pension and lived the rest of his life as a woman, forging a very successful career in Britain as a female fencer.

We simply don’t know whether D’Eon would have chosen to be transvestite, transsexual or something else entirely if those options had been available. We didn’t want to repeat the mistake of the French king, in not realising that a man could choose to wear a dress, so we decided to use the male pronoun.

The chevalier’s Wikipedia entry, in contrast, suggests the article’s editors have tried to avoid pronouns at all, producing sentences like “In an effort to save d'Éon's station in London, d'Éon published much of the secret diplomatic correspondence about d'Éon's recall…”

I’m not sure D’Eon was really forced into the choice of living as a woman. The 1777 agreement between D’Eon and Pierre-Augustin Caron du Beaumarchais, acting on behalf of the French government, did state that D’Eon had to dress as a woman as a condition of returning to France with a pension. However, it also served as a royal ruling that D’Eon was a woman and used female terms like “demoiselle” and “spinster.”

D’Eon’s additions to that agreement, crossed out by Beaumarchais, insisted that the chevalier had been female all along: “Seeing that son sexe has been proved by witnesses, physicians, surgeons, matrons and legal documents”; and “That I have already worn [female clothing] upon several occasions known to his Majesty.” Those don’t seem like the protests of someone being made to do something against his will. Saying the king made D’Eon dress in female clothing seems like saying Brer Fox made Brer Rabbit go into the briar patch.

Furthermore, in 1785 D’Eon returned to Britain, beyond Louis XVI’s reach. The French Revolution ended the pension from Paris in the early 1790s. Yet D’Eon continued to live as a woman until dying in 1810, so consistently that it was a surprise when physicians reported the chevalier had “male organs in every respect perfectly formed.”

I agree that it’s impossible to know whether the Chevalier d’Eon would have chosen any of the modern categories of transvestite, transsexual, or genderqueer. But it looks to me like D’Eon did choose to maneuver into the eighteenth-century category of woman.

Another Side of the Chevalier d’Eon

I’m recommending this podcast lecture from the National Archives in Britain:. It’s titled “The Chevalier d’Eon: Transgender Diplomat at the Court of George III, 1763-1777,” but it’s really about that French nobleman’s career in Britain before he decided to live as a woman full-time (which is the part of his life everyone talks about).

The speaker, Jonathan Conlin from the University of Southampton, draws parallels between D’Eon and the British politician John Wilkes. In 1763, each man fell afoul of his own country’s government and took refuge in the other. For Wilkes, life in France was only a short-term exile. For D’Eon, Britain would be his home for another decade, and the refuge where he returned for good during the French Revolution.

As Conlin explains, D’Eon first arrived in London as a diplomat helping to negotiate the end of the Seven Years’ War, and then in early 1763 became France’s highest diplomat in London—as well as the coordinator of a ring of spies scouting for vulnerabilities in British shoreline defenses for when the next war came.

After only a few months the French government appointed someone in D’Eon’s place, and he simply refused to come home. What’s more, the chevalier started a pamphlet war in London, arguing that his government was treating him unjustly. He published some of the diplomatic correspondence he possessed, an implicit threat to publish even more sensitive documents.

Conlin describes how D’Eon, though writing only in French, adopted the Wilkesite rhetoric of justice threatened by a corrupt government. And Wilkes’s followers in London protected the French aristocrat from capture by his countrymen.

This lecture stops when D’Eon and the French monarchy reached an accommodation in the late 1760s. Later they’d make another deal that allowed him to return to France and adopt a female identity. Only then, it appears, did the chevalier rewrite his/her earlier career to claim that he/she had been a woman all along.

Washington “discovered to be of the Female Sex”

On 25 Jan 1783 both the London Daily Advertiser and the Whitehall Evening Post printed an item they said had come from the 11 November Pennsylvania Gazette by way of the Dublin Register. It told readers:

A Discovery has lately been made on this Continent that will astonish the whole World. Our great and excellent General Washington is actually discovered to be of the Female Sex. This important secret was revealed by the Lady who lived with the General as a Wife these 30 years, and died the 6th instant at the General’s seat in Virginia, to the Clergyman who attended her. What is extraordinary, the Lady knew the Circumstance previous to the Ceremony of Marriage, and both agreed to live together from Motives of the most refined Friendship.

Perhaps there are fewer Instances in Female Nature of such rigid Chastity than of manly Fortitude. The famous Hannah Snell served as a private Soldier in the British Army and was present at many Battles and Sieges in the late War. The Chevalier d’Eon was a Captain of Dragoons, Knight of the Royal and Military Order of St. Louis, and Ambassador from tho Most Christian King to his Britannick Majesty, and made herself celebrated by her repeated Challenges to the Compte de Guerchy, her Successor in the Employ. In more antient Times France nearly recovered her Empire from the Hands of the British Regency by the astonishing Bravery of the Maid of Orleans; and now the Rights of America have been asserted and her Independence established through the amazing Fortitude of a Woman. Perhaps it is fortunate that this Circumstance was not known at a more early Period of the Contest.

In fact, there’s no record of an eighteenth-century Irish newspaper called the Dublin Register. The Pennsylvania Gazette didn’t publish on 11 Nov 1782. No article like this has been found in any American newspaper. And of course Martha Washington (shown above) hadn’t died.

The Whitehall Evening Post had probably copied the article from the Daily Advertiser, which may have originated the story or may have been duped. The far less reputable Rambler’s Magazine picked up the tidbit for its March issue, adding the cartoon of “Mrs. General Washington” that I shared here.

After that, the story faded, but the Chevalier d’Eon clipped a copy and kept it in a scrapbook along with other items mentioning him, favorably or unfavorably.

(Thanks to commenter John Johnson for the pointer.)

Portrait of a Lady Chevalier

The British art dealer Philip Mould saw this portrait in a New York gallery, labeled as “Portrait of a Woman with a Feather in her hat” and attributed to Gilbert Stuart. Scholars last examined it around 1926, but it had not been seen publicly since that decade.

Mould saw something more in the painting, bought it, and brought it to Britain for conservation. Eventually he determined the portrait wasn’t by Stuart, and wasn’t of a woman.

According to the History Blog:

Old varnish and dirt had obscured the signature of the real artist: Thomas Stewart, an 18th century English painter who is not very well known today, but who starting in the 1780s was a successful painter specializing in portraits of actors. Next to the “T. Stewart” signature is the date “1792.” . . .

The cleaning also revealed another telling detail: a noticeable five o’clock shadow on the lady’s face. . . .

[Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont,] the Chevalier d’Eon…was known to always wear a black dress and the medal of the Order of St. Louis, which he had been awarded by Louis XV for his work as a spy. D’Eon was living in London in 1792, making a living doing demonstration fencing matches, so that fits with the timing and focus of Thomas Stewart’s work.

The Chevalier d’Eon was one of the most famous figures of late-eighteenth-century Europe—a French spy, soldier, and ambassador who fell out with the French monarchy. Having drafted the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War, he settled in England in the mid-1760s. There D’Eon took to wearing women’s clothing all the time, telling various stories of why he did so. The chevalier’s life thus took him across several delicate boundary lines: male and female; France and Britain; war, espionage, and diplomacy.

As a foreigner of high birth, a recognized eccentric, and a public performer, the chevalier in exile became a British celebrity. Engravers created several images of him for public consumption, but this oil painting is a rare large formal portrait. Stewart evidently created it for Francis Rawdon-Hastings, second Earl of Moira, whom we have met during the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Click on the picture above for a webpage with a larger image of the portrait that includes the chevalier’s medal.

Unlikely Events and Unlikely Allies

On Saturday the Boston Globe ran a brief interview with Joel Richard Paul, author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution. The paper described that book as “a story too good not to tell—involving the celebrated French dramatist Caron de Beaumarchais, a cross-dressing secret agent named the Chevalier d’Eon, and a boatload of duplicity, hypocrisy, and corruption.”

I hadn’t thought that D’Eon de Beaumont had much to do with the American Revolution, but the book’s jacket copy says the chevalier’s “decision to declare herself a woman helped to lead to the Franco-American alliance.” I’ll have to put this on my list.

The interview contained some interesting observations about researching and interpreting historical documents:

Q. Tell me about doing research for this book. These are three pretty fringe characters you write about.

A. I spent a lot of time at the archives of the French foreign ministry and Bibliotèque nationale de France. I love France, but let’s just say that library science is not their forte. I came away convinced they hadn’t lost their colonies as much as misfiled them.

Q. We like to put the Founding Fathers on a pedestal, and your book paints a quite flawed and human picture of them. What kind of response are you getting?

A. When I speak to groups I always start off saying that the one thing we all know about the diplomacy of the American Revolution is that Ben Franklin went to France in 1776 and forged the Franco-American alliance that provided us with arms. And that’s wrong. Most people are very surprised, and very interested.

Q. Does it make you wonder how many more people are out there who changed the course of history and who we know nothing about?

A. Yeah. I think that most of us start with the assumption that history is shaped by great men or great ideas or great social movements. And one of the things I’ve seen is the extent to which history is shaped by accident, and people acting on the periphery of great events.

Another lively book based, like this one, in Silas Deane’s stumbling attempts at diplomacy and espionage is The Incendiary (also published as John the Painter), by Jessica Warner; I wrote more about it here.

Paul’s third answer above brings up the the question of “agency”—historians’ jargon for the idea that individual decisions can affect the course of major events. Usually that argument gets played out through “great men” and women, leaders making decisions for many other people. But might the real argument for individual effects lie in the plane of peripheral events, quirky accidents, and unintended consequences?