How much sincerity was there in these bombastic declarations? Did he realise, in a last lucid interval, that the loss of his dragoon’s uniform involved the ruin of all the noble aspirations of his youth, wantonly sacrificed to an inordinate, and henceforward vain, ambition? Does this unwavering attachment to the symbol of discipline and a regular career betoken a last regret for the secure and honourable existence that would have been his had he but bridled his desires? Perhaps; but possibly it was merely another pretence, an indirect means of prolonging an ambiguous situation and of imposing on the world at large. The decision of the English courts and the command of the King of France had made a woman of him; but the reluctance he showed to assuming the garments of his new sex tended to confirm the opinion of those who still considered him a man. By declaring so openly that he was being compelled to wear female apparel d’Eon evidently intended to convey the impression that the sex was as distasteful to him as the garb, and that the King’s will, to which he must perforce submit, could in no degree modify nature. He thus averted the difficulties of the moment, while preparing the way for a reappearance in male attire at some future date. Voltaire alone, among his contemporaries, appears to have seen through the pretence, to which he does justice by a somewhat unkind comparison: “I cannot believe,” he writes from Ferney to the Comte d’Argental, “that the Chevalier or the Chevalière d’Eon, whose chin is adorned with a very thick and very prickly black beard, is a woman. I am inclined to think that he has carried the eccentricity of his adventures to the point of aspiring to change his sex in order to escape the vengeance of the House of Guerchy, just as Pourceaungnac disguised himself as a woman to escape from justice and the apothecaries.” Moreover, while protesting loudly against the King’s command, by which his helmet was converted into a mob-cap, d’Eon strove to turn his new condition to account, and to attain fresh and still greater notoriety by his metamorphosis. He relates himself how, passing through Saint Denis, on his way to Versailles, he made Dom Boudier lead him to the mother-superior of the Carmelite convent, no less a person than Madame Louise de France. Before drawing the curtains of the parlour the daughter of Louis XV. asked, it is said, how Mademoiselle d’Eon was dressed, and on being told that she was still in riding-boots and uniform, having only just arrived from London, “Madame Louise exhorted her invisible interlocutor to assume the attire and to lead the life of a Christian woman.” However, notwithstanding the wise counsel of the venerable princess, and in spite of the formal condition imposed by Vergennes in his letter of July 12, it was only at Versailles, where he arrived equipped as a dragoon, that d’Eon finally yielded, and complied with an order which was renewed in the following terms:— IN THE KING’S NAME