It is difficult to believe that this letter can have sufficed to convince so shrewd a monarch, who had long since taken d’Eon’s measure. Like Voltaire, Louis XV. must have regarded all this as an absurd sham, the first news of which had, some months previously, left him sceptical. The very astonishment he had then shown disproves the assertion that the sovereign was the Chevalier’s secret accomplice. But that is the theory which Casanova has ventured to sustain in his _Mémoires_: The King alone knew, and always had known, that d’Eon was a woman, and the entire quarrel between the sham Chevalier and the Foreign Office was a farce which the King allowed to be played out for his own amusement.... Nobody ever possessed in a more marked degree the great royal virtue called dissimulation. Faithful guardian of a secret, he was delighted when he felt certain that none but he was aware of it. VII THE MORANDE CASE Louis XV., as his correspondence shows, was unaware of the secret of his former agent’s real sex or, more probably, indifferent to the question. As for d’Eon, he had only just decided finally to adopt the expedient, beginning to realise that his career was at an end, and that the only asylum he could hope for in France was at Tonnerre, or, as was even more likely, in the Bastille. He had not much more to lose as a man, and was seriously considering the advantages he should obtain from assuming the sex which the public attributed to him so persistently. Sensation, popularity, notoriety and fresh pecuniary resources were the stakes of a hazardous game, but one in which, in d’Eon’s opinion, the gain outweighed the risk, and he therefore decided to take his chance as soon as a favourable opportunity offered. Meanwhile he had not thought fit to make the Comte de Broglie directly acquainted with the change. The latter pretended to ignore it, and continued to employ his services as formerly, an urgent and particularly delicate affair just then needing his co-operation. The fact was a report had just been spread in Madame du Barry’s set to the effect that a scandalous work against herself, in which even the person of the King was not spared, was about to be published in London, and thence to be circulated on the continent. The author of this pamphlet was a certain Théveneau de Morande, who, having incurred the displeasure of the King’s tribunals, had sought in England the refuge of which all people like himself availed themselves at the time. A clever adventurer, and an intriguer of the worst type, he openly trafficked in London in scandal and slander. In a little blackmailing newspaper, which he edited himself, he disseminated the most odious calumnies to the prejudice of ministers and people about the court, which he interlarded with scandalous anecdotes current at Versailles, and “notices on several opera dancers, the whole”—Bachaumont concludes—“forming a most pernicious composition.”