Some, formerly enemies of Choiseul, delighted in contributing to the success of the Comte de Guerchy’s fiery adversary; but the majority, impelled by curiosity, chiefly showed perplexity at the sight of this pathological wonder, who, with all the appearance and the manners of a man, professed to be a woman. Several contemporaries have described d’Eon as they saw him on that occasion, and it must be admitted that their portraits are far from flattering. “She looks more than ever like a man now that she is a woman,” asserted a newspaper of the time, with reference to the Chevalier. “Indeed, it is impossible to believe that a person who shaves and has a beard; whose proportions and muscular development are herculean; who jumps in and out of a carriage without assistance and goes upstairs four steps at a time, belongs to the female sex.... She dresses in black. Her hair is cut in a circle, like a priest’s, and is plastered with pomade, powdered, and surmounted by a black cap, such as pious ladies wear. She still wears flat, round heels, being unaccustomed to the high, narrow ones worn by women.” D’Eon, in whom the elegant and fashionable paper recognises none of the charms of the fair sex, had not wished to carry his masquerade too far; but if he abstained from using rouge, which was still in vogue, he does not appear to have been entirely free from feminine coquetry, sometimes wearing “black dresses _en raz de Saint Maur_,” more often “sky-blue skirts with narrow, puce-coloured stripes,” or even, “reddish-brown figured twill skirts,” as we gather from the accounts of Mademoiselle Maillot, his dressmaker. But in spite of his efforts to attain elegancy, d’Eon remained supremely ridiculous. “The long train of his gown and his triple row of ruffles” contrasted so unhappily with “his deportment and behaviour, which were those of a grenadier, that he had an air of unmistakable vulgarity.” Such are the unkind terms in which Madame Campan expresses herself in her _Mémoires_, which she wrote after d’Eon’s death, at a time when, enlightened as to the Chevalier’s real sex, she could not entirely conceal her vexation at having been hoaxed by one whom she and her family had befriended.