Such was the portrait the Chevalier d’Eon sketched of himself for the Duc de Praslin, at the height of the crisis which shaped his destiny; and it is exact enough. To show all he could do, to fulfil his destiny to the end, he should have lived in a country and at a period more favourable to adventures than was France in the eighteenth century; strongly organised and firmly established as it was by Louis XIV. Owing to his lack of respect for this powerful hierarchy and to his efforts to upset its stability for his own ends, d’Eon, who had begun life as a gentleman, ended his days equivocally as an adventurer. In his haste to improve a fortune which was too lagging and parsimonious for his taste, he exceeded the bounds of legitimate ambition. He set aside all restraint in his behaviour, forced and wasted his talent, ruined at one stroke the brilliant prospects to which his courage and intelligence entitled him, and, passing from one adventure to another, concluded by playing for over forty years, with skill and tenacity worthy of a better part, the strangest masquerade on record. He says himself with reference to the people of Tonnerre, his fellow-townsmen: “They are like the flints that are found in their vineyards; the harder they are struck the more fire they give out.” This picturesque image admirably illustrates his own history and the epic struggle which he maintained with increasing stubbornness against all who thwarted his ambition. Nevertheless, his character is an interesting one, and well repays study. Throughout the calculated extravagance of his adventures, d’Eon’s indomitable energy persists, and the scandal caused by his conduct a century and a half ago should not blind us to his genuine services. There is a sustained interest in following d’Eon into many countries from Russia to England, and into many surroundings from the court of the Empress Elizabeth or the camp of Marshal de Broglie to the palace of Versailles and the shops of London, wherever, in fact, the Chevalier’s adventures led him for a period of more than sixty years; at one time as a diplomatist, again as a dragoon, or, as Latour represents him in one of his charming pastels, as a woman.