D’Eon recounted the history of the papers in his possession, and the offers which he had resisted. Charmed to oblige a woman so interesting by her sorrows, her courage, her _esprit_, Beaumarchais addressed at once touching letters to the King in favor of his new friend. “When one thinks,” he writes, “that this creature, so much persecuted, belongs to a sex to which one forgives everything, the heart is touched with a sweet compassion.” “I do assure you, Sire,” he writes elsewhere, “that in taking this astonishing creature with dexterity and gentleness, although she is embittered by twelve years of misfortune, she can yet be brought to enter under the yoke, and to give up all the papers of the late King on reasonable conditions.” As to the motives which could have induced le chevalier d’Eon to avow himself a woman, his biographer, already quoted, gives the following explanation: “His military and diplomatic career was about finished; disgraced, he would disappear from the scene of the world and fall into obscurity. But precisely shadow and silence were a horror to him. If there was a mystery in his existence, if they learned that he was a woman, he would become the hero of the day and of the century; his services would then appear extraordinary. This metamorphosis would attract to him the attention of Europe, and enable him more easily to obtain satisfaction from the French government, who would no longer refuse a woman the price of blood shed and services rendered.” Both Gaillardet and Loménie, after a careful examination of all the correspondence in relation to the affair between the Chevalier d’Eon and Beaumarchais, assure us that not a line exists which does not prove that the latter was completely deceived as to the matter of the sex of the Chevalier. Lintilhac, however, thinks that he has found proofs to the contrary in a letter which begins, “Ma pauvre Chevalière, or whatever it pleases you to be with me....” London, Dec. 31, 1775. Gudin, in his life of Beaumarchais, says, “It was at a dinner of the Lord Mayor Wilkes that I encountered d’Eon for the first time. Struck to see the cross of St. Louis shining on his breast, I asked Mlle. Wilkes who that chevalier was; she named him to me. ‘He has,’ I said, ‘the voice of a woman.’ It is probably from that fact that the talk has all come. At that time I knew nothing more about him; I was still ignorant of his relations with Beaumarchais. I soon learned them from herself. She avowed to me with tears (it appears to have been the manner of d’Eon—note of Loménie) that she was a woman, and showed me her scars, remains of wounds which she had received, when, her horse killed under her, a squadron of cavalry passed over her body and left her dying on the plain.”