‘Some of my discreet friends have recommended me to leave London for a month or two, and travel quietly in Ireland under an assumed name, for I am not known there. In spite of my threats and the blows I have dealt, and of my conduct through life, an inconceivable mania for effecting insurances to a considerable amount on the uncertainty of my sex has again taken hold of people in the city, and I am cautioned, from several quarters, that some rich persons entertain the idea of having me carried off, by artifice, force, or stratagem, so that the point may be settled in defiance of me, a thing I will not tolerate, and which, should the attempt be made, will place me under the cruel necessity of killing somebody.... I can declare to you, sir, upon my honour, that I am not interested to the value of even one _sou_ in these bets and insurances.... I am sufficiently mortified at being what nature has made me, and that the dispassion of my natural temperament should induce my friends to imagine, in their innocence, and this in France, in Russia, and in England, that I am of the female sex. The malice of my enemies has confirmed all this since the beginning of my misfortunes, which I have not by any means deserved, and of which I should have been rid long ago. I leave all to the King’s and to your own kindness of heart....’[257] [Sidenote: ON THE DEFENSIVE.] The tone of swagger repeated in the above letters, would dispose to the belief that D’Eon was exaggerating the degree of front he had shown to those Englishmen who were taking unwarrantable liberties with his name; but the measure of his veracity would appear to be out of the question. In the ‘Public Advertiser’ of November 16, 1774, it was stated that— ‘the Chevalier D’Eon with justice complains of our public prints; they are eternally sending him to France, when he is body and soul fixed in this country; they have lately confined him to the Bastille, when he fled to England as a country of liberty, and they lately made a woman of him, when not one of his enemies dared to put his manhood to the proof. He makes no complaint of the English ladies.’ That the calumnies of which D’Eon continued to be the object were not chargeable to all classes of society, is to be inferred from a notice which appeared in the papers a few days later, announcing— ‘Earl Ferrers, Sir John Fielding, Messieurs Addington and Wright, and other worthy magistrates and gentlemen, and their ladies, did the Chevalier the honour to dine with him in Brewer Street, Golden Square, a convincing proof that he is not confined in the Bastille, as certain weak and wicked persons have popularly asserted, ignorant of the justice and honour his worth and merit have deserved.’