Fromageot. _La Chevalière d’Eon à Versailles (Le Carnet historique et littéraire, 1900)._ PREFACE After the death of the Chevalier d’Eon in London in extreme poverty in the year 1810, a mass of his unpublished papers and letters, which he had carefully preserved all his life, fell into the hands of one of his creditors, and lay neglected for nearly a hundred years in an English bookseller’s shop. There it was that the authors of this book were fortunate enough to discover them by chance at a sale. These private documents, in addition to the state papers in the archives of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the municipal records of his native town of Tonnerre, enable his biographers to follow the career of the Chevalier with particularity, and to set at rest what was for so long a vexed question, the mystery of his sex. It was a deliberate step, the assumption of femininity, by which to regain a waning popularity. After a brilliant military and diplomatic career, as well as repeated employment in the secret service of Louis XV., his ill-judged conduct in London covered him with disgrace at Versailles. Some fresh action was demanded to reinstate himself in public notice, and as rumour persistently named him a woman he felt the time had come to play the part. As the result of long negotiation he was permitted to return to France. There he became the heroine of the hour, and the ingenuity of his personification induced belief in the Chevalière not only in Louis XVI. and his ministers, but also—a more difficult matter—in the friends of his youth. These unpublished papers are of further value, for they include correspondence with many notable people of d’Eon’s day, and serve to reflect not only his own personality but those prominent in a society which differed in its striking contrasts from that of any other historical period. D’EON DE BEAUMONT HIS LIFE AND TIMES I FROM TONNERRE TO ST. PETERSBURG “If you want to know what I am, Monsieur le Duc, I tell you frankly that I am of use only for thinking, imagining, questioning, reflecting, comparing, reading, writing, or to run from east to west, from north to south, to fight over hill and dale. Had I lived in the time of Alexander or of Don Quixote, I should certainly have been Parmenion or Sancho Panza. Taken out of my element I will squander the entire revenue of France in the course of a twelvemonth without committing a single folly, and afterwards present you with an able treatise on economy.”