Voltaire says of him: “The whole adventure confounds me. I cannot understand either d’Eon, or the ministers of his time, or the measures of Louis XV, or those being made at present. I understand nothing of the whole affair.” In his _Mémoires sur le Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont_, M. Gaillardet says: “The history of the Chevalier d’Eon was one of the most singular and most controverted enigmas of the 18th century. That century finished without its being known what was the veritable sex of that mysterious being, who after being successively doctor of law, advocate in the Parliament of Paris, censor of belles-lettres, secretary of embassy at St. Petersburg, captain of dragoons, Chevalier de Saint Louis, minister plenipotentiary to London, suddenly, at the age of 46 years announced himself to be a woman, assumed the costume of his new rôle, and conserved it until the time of his death in 1810.” As we shall presently see, and for reasons wholly justifiable, it is Beaumarchais who works this transformation in the life of d’Eon. Nothing in relation to his strange character is so passing strange as the fact that the King and his minister, and above all that Beaumarchais himself, the cleverest of men—should have been completely duped by the Chevalier as to the matter of his sex. It even went so far as to be generally believed that the _demoiselle_ d’Eon was seriously in love with Beaumarchais, and the latter himself believed it. In the most skillful way the chevalier endeavored to make use of this deceit to further his own ends. Failing in this, and having made the fatal avowal and received the King’s orders to assume the garb of a woman, the fury of d’Eon knew no bounds. Powerless to wreak his vengeance in any other way, he endeavored by calumny and abuse to thwart the career of the man upon whom he had been able to impose only in the matter of his sex. Beaumarchais readily excused all the insults cast at him, believing as he did, that this is the manner of revenge of the strange creature, “his amazon”—(as d’Eon is familiarly called in the correspondence between himself and the minister Vergennes)—for finding that her love is not requited.