Various are the reported motives of his subsequent assumption of female sex and attire. By some it was attributed to an order from the Duc d’Aiguillon, minister of foreign affairs, prohibiting his appearance in France except in a female dress; while D’Eon pretended that he had assumed this costume to preserve the honour of De Guerchy, whose face he had slapped. Others asserted that he wore this disguise to enable the cabinet of Versailles to throw the blame attached to the treaty of 1763 on a woman. Howbeit, he only made his appearance in France after the deaths both of D’Aiguillon and Guerchy; and on his return to Paris presented a memorial to Maurepas the then minister, praying that the order which enjoined him to wear female attire might be revoked, and the following was the strange tenor of this application: “I am under the necessity of humbly submitting to your lordship that the period of my female noviciate is expired, and that it is impossible that I should become as professed. I have been able, in obedience to the orders of the late King and his ministers, to remain in petticoats during peace; but that is quite out of the question in time of war. It is necessary for the honour of the illustrious house of De Guerchy that I should be allowed to continue my military services; such, at least, is the opinion of the whole army and the world. I have always thought and acted like Achilles; I never wage war with the dead, and I only kill the living when they attack me.” The Count de Guerchy, whom he had mortally insulted, was dead; but his only son was living, and anxious to wipe off in D’Eon’s blood the unavenged insult offered to his family; when the countess his mother, justly apprehensive of the issue of a meeting between the young count and the most experienced swordsman in the country, supplicated the minister to exert his influence and reject the application of the dubious D’Eon. The injunction to wear a female garb was renewed; and the pension of five hundred pounds per annum, granted to him by Louis XV, was continued on this condition. This strange position exposed our disguised hero to many curious scenes and insults; and, having one day involved himself in a serious quarrel at the play-house, he was sent a close prisoner to the citadel of Dijon. At the revolution of 1789 D’Eon returned to England, where he gave lessons in the sword exercise; and on several occasions fenced in public, and not unfrequently with the Prince of Wales. This extraordinary person died in London in 1810, at the advanced age of seventy-nine; when the celebrated medical friar and favourite of Carlton House, Père Elysée, after a _post-mortem_ examination, put the mooted question beyond further doubt by the official assertion of the manhood of the defunct.