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The Gender Fluid Spy of the Enlightenment
The celebrated Chevalier d’Éon was an aristocrat, soldier, diplomat, writer, and spy
It was the spring of 1810. Ordinarily, the death in London of an 81-year-old French émigré of aristocratic birth who’d long been living in genteel poverty would arouse little attention. The city was flooded with aristocrats during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Some of them never left.
But as the body of the deceased, known as the Chevalier d’Éon, was being prepared for burial, medical authorities swooped in to perform an investigation.
Its purpose? To answer a question that had been raised in society in the 1770s and persisted ever since, a debate that obsessed so many that the London Stock Exchange made it a betting-pool subject.
Was the Chevalier d’Éon a man or a woman?
Born on October 5, 1728, d’Éon’s full name was Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont. The only son of Louis Deon de Beaumont — an advocate in Parliament, a King’s Counsellor, and a member of the petite noblesse — he was raised in the elite, dissolute world of Dangerous Liaisons.
In his early 20s, d’Éon continued to present as male. He was charming and intelligent, a gifted…
