‘However great my pleasure would be at seeing you, I have no wish, _ma chère Lia_, to have to reproach myself with committing another folly. Therefore remain shut up until your eyes are quite well again.... I shall perhaps call to see you, some day after to-morrow, so soon as my lame courier will have left. This will depend upon what the Chancellor is going to do, and on my fancy. Adieu, _ma belle de Beaumont_. I embrace you. L’HÔPITAL.’ ‘A Monsieur D’Eon, St. Petersburg.’ Could Lia have been the name adopted by D’Eon during his disguise in 1755, or are we to believe that it was playfully applied by the ambassador to the secretary suffering from ophthalmia, because ‘Leah was tender-eyed?’ The secret autograph order of Louis XV., dated October 4, 1763 (p. 104), is sufficiently significative, and can only have reference to the Chevalier’s earliest connection with Russia, because from August, 1756, he was officially recognised as secretary of Embassy, until his final departure for France in August, 1760, after which he fell ill of small-pox. Early in 1761 he joined the army in the field, served as aide-de-camp to the de Broglios throughout the campaign of that year, and upon his return to France went on leave, whilst awaiting the appointment of minister plenipotentiary to Russia, which, he wrote to tell his colonel, the Marquis d’Autichamp, would take him to St. Petersburg for the fourth time. See ‘Lettres, Mémoires,’ &c. Madame Campan had frequently heard the Chevalier repeat to her father, M. Genest, the contents of Louis XV.’s order, in which that monarch separated his individuality from the person of the King of France. She had special opportunities afterwards, as lady-in-waiting to the queen, for becoming acquainted with D’Eon’s character during his two years’ residence at the Court of Marie Antoinette and in its precincts, and she long survived him, dying in 1822; we may therefore legitimately assume that had his veracity been generally mistrusted, or had she doubted the existence of such an order, she would assuredly have qualified his statement, unless she had cause to be satisfied that the order, which it is pretty certain she never saw, was indeed in the King’s own hand. Dutens’ version is to this effect. The King had a secret minister at the several Courts, who carried out his views without the knowledge of his ambassador. This was the position at the Court of Russia of the Chevalier D’Eon, sent thither upon the recommendations of the Prince de Conti, who was not even aware of his sex. He spent several months at St. Petersburg, and was clever enough to secure presentation to the Empress Elizabeth in the character of a female, and conclude in fifteen days an affair upon which the ambassador had been for a long time engaged.