Tonnerre Patrimoine

Maison du chevalier d'éon

During his stays in Tonnerre, the Chevalier d'Éon resided in this peaceful family home. It was within these walls that he was placed under house arrest between 1779 and 1785, with the obligation to wear women's clothing. Until then, he had gloriously served his country as a diplomat at foreign courts. But he committed the irreparable act of revealing state secrets. He died in London in 1810. At the autopsy, the forensic pathologists settle the mystery once and for all: the Chevalier d'Éon is indeed a man.

Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont, known as the "Chevalier d'Éon" (October 5, 1728 at the Hôtel d'Uzès, Tonnerre - May 21, 1810 in London) was a French author, diplomat and spy.
He is remembered for the way he dressed, which made him look like a woman. On his death, however, he was recognized by a council of doctors as male and perfectly constituted.
Charles d'Éon de Beaumont was the son of Louis d'Éon de Beaumont, a lawyer at the Paris Parliament who had made his fortune in the wine trade as director of the king's estates, and Françoise de Charanton, daughter of a commissioner general of wars in the armies of Spain and Italy.
D'Éon recounts in his autobiography, Les Loisirs du chevalier d'Éon de Beaumont, that he was born "coiffed", i.e. covered in fetal membranes, with his head and sex concealed, and that the town doctor was unable to determine his sex.

Youth

He was born in Tonnerre, where his father, a minor nobleman, was elected mayor. He began his studies there, then, in 1743, continued them in Paris with his uncle, at the Collège Mazarin, where he obtained a degree in civil and canon law in 1749; he was then twenty-one. Following in the footsteps of his noblesse de robe family, he registered as a lawyer at the Parlement de Paris on August 22, 1748.
He was also a talented horseman and fencer.
In 1753, he published several Considérations historiques et politiques. The work was well received, and the young man built up a network of contacts, including the Prince de Conti, cousin of King Louis XV, who appointed him royal censor for History and Belles-Lettres.

Career

When asked, Charles d'Éon was recruited into the "Secret du Roi", Louis XV's black cabinet, which pursued a policy parallel to the official councils; the Prince de Conti, the Maréchal de Noailles, Beaumarchais and M. de Tercier were also members. In June 1756, at the start of the Seven Years' War, he was immediately dispatched to the Russian court as ambassadorial secretary, in order to obtain an alliance with France from Czarina Elisabeth.
He later recounted, in the romanticized publication of his Memoirs, that he had been "lectrice" to the Tsarina under the name of Lia de Beaumont.
The Tsarina then realized the disguise and tried to "consummate", but he remained "limp" and was called mad. In fact, the position didn't exist at the Russian court, and the story doesn't appear until he's in England. At the Russian court, where the Czarina gave costume balls where roles were reversed - men had to be dressed as women and women as men - d'Éon undoubtedly took pleasure in cross-dressing, his slight build enabling him to mystify everyone.
He was again in St. Petersburg as ambassadorial secretary from 1758 to 1760, taking the text of the treaty of alliance to the king at Versailles, where he arrived two days before the courier dispatched by the Czarina. The king rewarded him with a brevet de capitaine de dragons in 1760. D'Éon took part in the final campaigns of the Seven Years' War, where he was wounded.
He left the army in 1762 to become a secret agent once again.
D'Éon was then sent to London in 1762, where he collaborated with the ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais, as "secretary to the French embassy for the conclusion of the general peace" in drafting the Paris peace treaty, which was signed on February 10, 1763. His great diplomatic skills and his ability to subvert the preparatory documents for the treaty, at a time when France was being defeated by England, which wanted to seize the entire French colonial empire, earned him the Royal and Military Order of Saint-Louis, one of the highest honors of the time.
At the same time, d'Éon was commissioned by the Secret du Roi to draw up a plan for the invasion of Great Britain, and more specifically for a raid on England and Wales, whose coast he had reconnoitred with the Marquis Carlet de la Rozière. He was appointed acting ambassador when the Duc de Nivernais returned to Paris, ill. While waiting for a new ambassador, d'Éon led a lavish lifestyle, which Choiseul, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, eventually refused to finance.
When the new ambassador, the comte de Guerchy, arrived, d'Éon became his secretary as minister plenipotentiary. The two men were unable to reach an agreement. The king's esteem seemed to have been earned, and while he had once again become secretary after having been minister, d'Éon had difficulty accepting the remarks of his superior, whom he judged incompetent. Open warfare broke out in the French embassy, two camps were formed, and a war of libels began.
On November 4, 1763, Louis XV requested the Chevalier's extradition, but English law forbade it. Now a private individual, d'Éon provocatively continued to visit the French embassy and, in 1764, divulged state secrets and part of his personal correspondence, ready to scuttle his career in order to discredit Guerchy and blackmail the king, notably by revealing the mission order for the landing. The conflict was marked by several trials before His Majesty's Court. At one of these, a surprise witness accused the French ambassador of attempting to poison his ex-secretary during a meal8. The last trial, in September 1767, found in favor of the Chevalier d'Éon, who continued to work as a spy and once again received his pension. Having to appear at one of his many trials, but with neither lawyer nor witnesses, he preferred to hide out and disguise himself as a woman, taking refuge with a friend. In fact, disgraced and forgotten since giving up blackmail, he feels the need to provoke by disguising himself as a woman, and to spread the rumor that he has always been a woman6.

Gender

Satire of the fencing duel between "Monsieur de Saint-George and Mademoiselle la chevalière d'Éon de Beaumont" at Carlton House on April 9, 1787. Engraving by Victor Marie Picot based on the original work by Charles Jean Robineau
His alleged madness fueled the arguments of Treyssac de Vergy and Ange Goudar, two men of letters in the ambassador's employ. The rumor was persistent, fueled by the Chevalier's equivocal, non-conformist attitude. His change of sex was also a factor. From madman to hermaphrodite to woman. The British produced numerous caricatures of the Chevalier, whom they dubbed Épicène d'Éon. They even went so far as to open bets on his sex: a bettor took another bettor to court, and the court, with false witnesses and in Éon's absence, recognized him as a woman. This sex change and cross-dressing can be interpreted in a number of ways, from Freudian (neurosis, narcissistic delusion, schizophrenia, etc.) to purely political or strategic.
At the same time, d'Éon was involved with the French libellist Charles Théveneau de Morande. In 1775, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was sent to London by French King Louis XVI to retrieve from Chevalier d'Éon the correspondence exchanged with the late King Louis XV (including his landing plans and Théveneau de Morande's Mémoires de Mme du Barry). After many twists and turns, a twenty-page transaction was concluded between the two of them, stipulating that the documents would be handed over in full and that the chevalière would never again change out of her female clothes, henceforth calling herself Mlle Éon. In exchange, she was granted a life annuity. The negotiations lasted fourteen months.
D'Éon left London on August 13, 1777, and presented herself to the Court as a dragoon captain. King Louis XVI issued an order on August 27, 1777, either in revenge or because he thought she was really a woman, ordering her "to leave the dragoon uniform she continued to wear, and to resume the clothes of her sex, with a ban on appearing in the kingdom in anything other than women's clothing": dressed by Rose Bertin at Marie-Antoinette's expense, he was presented to the Court in a basket dress and corset on November 23, 1777. He became the darling of the capital, but wanted to take part in the American War of Independence, so he dressed up as a dragon. Arrested on March 20, 1779, he was exiled to Tonnerre, where he resigned himself to looking after his family estate.

End of life

In 1783, the king let him return to Paris. In November 1785, armed with a passport, he returned to Great Britain, where the London landlord of his apartment demanded his rent. Although he had welcomed the French Revolution and proposed to the National Assembly that he lead a unit of Amazons, he lost his pension. The declaration of war on February 1, 1793 and heavy debts forced him to remain on British soil7. He found himself in semi-misery, having to survive by fencing duels and selling his library in May 1791. He was finally taken in by a British lady of his own age, the widow Mrs Mary Cole. He continued to fight fencing duels, always in women's clothing (maintaining his agility despite his heavy build), until the age of 68. He was seriously wounded in a final duel in August 1796, when a foil broke and pierced his lung.
In 1804, he was imprisoned for debts; released, he signed a contract to publish an autobiography, but was paralyzed in a fall following a vascular attack. A scratchy man, he lived in squalor for another four years, before dying in London on May 21, 1810, aged 81.
When the deceased's last bath was performed, it was discovered with amazement that this old lady... was a man. The surgeon M. Copeland, accompanied by seventeen witnesses, members of the Medical Faculty of Great Britain, declared in a forensic report11 on May 23, 1810: "I hereby certify that I have examined and dissected the body of the Chevalier d'Éon in the presence of M. Adair, M. Wilson, du père Élysée and that I have found on this body the male organs of generation perfectly formed in all respects "12.
The Chevalier d'Éon, dressed forty-nine years as a man and thirty-two as a woman, is buried in the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Pancrace, in the county of Middlesex.

View the "Éon de Tonnerre" video