In all the range of doubtful personalities there is hardly any one whom convention has treated worse than it has the individual known in his time--and after--as The Chevalier d’Eon. For about a hundred and fifty years he has been written of--and spoken of for the first half century of that time--simply as a man who masqueraded in woman’s clothes. There seems to be just sufficient truth in this to save certain writers on the subject from the charge of deliberate lying--a record which, even if it is to be posthumous, no man of integrity aims at; but it is abundantly evident that the rumour, which in time became a charge, was originally set on foot deliberately by his political enemies, who treated him and his memory without either consideration or even the elements of honourable truth. To begin with, here are the facts of his long life. Charles-Genevieve--Louis-Auguste-Andre--Timothée d’Eon de Beaumont was born in 1728 in Tonnerre in Yonne, a department of France in the old province of Burgundy. His father, Louis d’Eon, was a parliamentary barrister. As a youth he was so apt in his studies at the Collège Mazarin that he received by special privilege his degree of Doctor in Canon and Civil Law before the age appointed for the conferring of such honour, and was then enrolled in the list of parliamentary barristers in Paris. At first he had been uncertain which department of life he should undertake. He swayed on one side towards the church, on the other towards the world of letters and _beaux-arts_. He was by habit an athlete, and was so good a swordsman that later on he had no rival in fencing except the Chevalier de Saint-George. In his twenty-fifth year he published two remarkable books. One was on the political administration of ancient and modern people, and the other on Phases of Finance in France at different times. (The latter was afterwards published in German at Berlin in 1774, and so impressed the then King of Prussia that he gave orders that its ideas were to be carried into practical effect.) [Illustration: THE CHEVALIER D’EON]