A first incitement to the persuasion that D’Eon’s earliest introduction at St. Petersburg was in the character of a female, exists in the portrait by La Tour. When D’Eon was in his twenty-fifth (or more probably twenty-seventh[394]) year, La Tour was a greatly esteemed and general favourite; he had painted a full length picture of Louis XV., and portraits of Madame de Pompadour and many others at Court, and as it is scarcely credible, from what we know of his circumstances in those days, that D’Eon was in a position to employ an artist of established reputation to paint a fancy portrait of himself for himself, and this apart from his known innate dislike to any such travesty, we perhaps see personified in the comely young woman at page 14, a representation of _le petit D’Eon_, as he was expected, by the Prince de Conti, shortly to make his appearance at the Russian capital. In recapitulating his services to the Duke de Praslin (June 5, 1763) D’Eon showed that when sent to Petersburg by M. Rouillé, in 1756, for secret and important motives, reasons of policy required that certain views entertained with regard to himself, and for which he felt some repugnance, should be abandoned; whereupon he received the minister’s orders to remain with Douglas until the arrival of the new ambassador. What but a repetition of the part he played in 1755 is to be understood from his repugnance to perform duties assigned to him! It was quite beyond D’Eon’s power to endure from others any allusion to his effeminate appearance or physical defects, and he studiously eschewed all reference to his assumption of female attire, by rarely specifying his first visit to St. Petersburg as having been in 1755, preferring to allude in general terms to his ‘earliest journeys to Russia.’ Instances there are, as we have shown, to the contrary, but this was at a time when there no longer existed any object in concealing the past so very carefully, and when admission to that effect was only too likely, as he thought, to turn to his advantage. See p. 247 note, and p. 267. It was not his fault, he told the Count de Broglio, if the Princess Dashkoff assured people in England that he was a female; and it is true that _after the arrival of that lady in London, fresh reports were circulated tending to confirm the suspicions already entertained that the Chevalier was indeed a woman_. There is preserved in the public library at Tonnerre a note from the old Marquis de l’Hôpital to D’Eon, written in a spirit of pleasantry, and although undated, is obviously of the last half of 1759, or of the first half of 1760. ‘Noon.