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The Maiden of Tonnerre: The Vicissitudes of the Chevalier and the Chevalière D'Eon
"The Chevalier Charles-Genevive-Louise-Auguste-Andr-Thimothe d'Eon, after a distinguished career as a soldier, diplomat, and secret agent for the Government of King Louis XV of France, told the world that he was a woman who had disguised herself as a man. But d'Eon was lying. In fact he was a man pretending to be a woman who was now admitting to be a man. Why he did that and what happened to him as a result are the main dishes on Mr. Kates's rich banquet table." -- Richard Bernstein, New York Times, reviewing Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman by Gary KatesChevalier d'Eon de Beaumont was born in 1728. Raised as a boy, he was educated as a lawyer and entered the service of Louis XV as a diplomat. In 1756 he was sent to the Russian imperial court as a spy and was said to have dressed as a young woman to gain the confidence of the Empress Elizabeth. He later served in Russia (as a man) as secretary to the French ambassador. Returning to France in 1761, he was appointed a captain of the elite Dragoons, and, after the Treaty of Paris in 1762, went to England as a diplomat and spy. During that time persistent rumors that he was in fact a woman arose, and he did nothing to dispel them. By 1777 he was officially recognized as female in both England and France. Recalled to France, he was reluctantly compelled by Louis XVI to give up his male attire. In 1785 he began to compose his autobiography, which presented much of his experience in religious terms, and he moved back to London. He lived there as a woman until his death in 1810, at which time his body was discovered to be unambiguously male.
This volume includes the first English translations of d'Eon's autobiography (or "historical epistle")and other writings by d'Eon on his life, religious beliefs, and stories of women who concealed their sex to enter religious orders. As historian Gary Kates notes in the introduction, d'Eon's writing can be read on at least two levels: while it ostensibly tells the story of a woman who spent half her life as a man, it is in fact also the story of a man who spent half his life as a woman. As such it demonstrates both the construction and transgression of gender boundaries in personal and historical narrative.
This volume includes the first English translations of d'Eon's autobiography (or "historical epistle")and other writings by d'Eon on his life, religious beliefs, and stories of women who concealed their sex to enter religious orders. As historian Gary Kates notes in the introduction, d'Eon's writing can be read on at least two levels: while it ostensibly tells the story of a woman who spent half her life as a man, it is in fact also the story of a man who spent half his life as a woman. As such it demonstrates both the construction and transgression of gender boundaries in personal and historical narrative.
- GenresNonfictionHistoryQueer
240 pages, Hardcover
First published August 29, 2001
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About the author
Charles de Beaumont d'Éon
60 books2 followersCharles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont (5 October 1728 – 21 May 1810), usually known as the Chevalier d'Éon, was a French diplomat, spy and soldier, whose first 49 years were spent as a man, and whose last 33 years were spent as a woman. From 1777, d'Éon claimed to be anatomically a woman, and dressed as such. Doctors who examined the body after d'Éon's death discovered that she was anatomically male. She is considered to be one of the earliest openly transgender people.
The title chevalier, French for knight, refers to the honorary title "chevalier des ordres du Roi", to which d'Éon was entitled after receiving the Order of Saint-Louis in 1763.
The title chevalier, French for knight, refers to the honorary title "chevalier des ordres du Roi", to which d'Éon was entitled after receiving the Order of Saint-Louis in 1763.
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July 11, 2024
This is the one. At this point I've read about five biographies of D'Eon, and while I can't say I understand what's going on here (I don't think a single historian does), this translated collection of her essential autobiographical writings certainly gets me closest to it.
If you're reading this, I expect you already understand the basic outlines of the Charlotte D'Eon mythology: an early modern French bureaucrat who was "like" a trans woman, receiving legal recognition as female from the king in 1777. Always androgynous, upon death in 1810 she was attested male by anatomists, so shocked they even produced an etching of the genitals of her corpse, you know, "for science." She left thousands and thousands of pages of notes and letters and receipts, of which this is a small but vital selection. Technically speaking, the endnotes are sufficient and the translation is precise, so this review will concern D'Eon's writing itself.
One thing reading this collection immediately dispels is that there is any conceivable way to remedy these disagreements in the historical record. No amount of intersexual magical thinking can mediate between the coroners' reports in 1810 and Charlotte's own multiple references to vaginal inspections and fear of pregnancy, which are insistent enough they give the text a strong odor of "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." While I understand only too well how trans women are regularly depicted as charlatans and frauds, Charlotte really was just lying here. And where there is one big lie, most biographers of D'Eon have decided, there are many little ones.
But -- perhaps it's best for us historians to stop obsessing over anatomy, and start recognizing that Charlotte's thought here was mostly operating on a different level. As a poor and pious Catholic at the end of her life, when most of this autobiographical material was produced, Charlotte, by her own attestation, had "not quitted his bed, his room, or his house nine times during the last nine years." (While generally using female pronouns after 1777, she used both.) Even before this, as a child she attests to a "philosophical diet," to "staying in bed working from day to night." Despite her decades of civil service, including a few active years in the military, Charlotte portrays her life as vita contemplativa, a life of the mind. Her understanding of sex, and everything else, was intensely mental.
In this way her thinking about sex became genuinely out of sync with her times, or at least, the medicine and law of her times. It had a heavy philosophical, later religious character. (On that note, a lot of this translation is Charlotte droning on about virginity and Jesus Christ, and you will have to engage that to get to the transgender stuff most of us are more interested in today.) There's simply too much reverent writing from Charlotte in this collection about women who dressed as men for me to agree with the general historical assessment this "identity" was a knowing masquerade Charlotte picked up to hide that she was really a man dressing as a woman. (The last section of the book is an entire history of women, mostly Catholic saints, dressing as men. To Charlotte, these were her ancestors.) She was obsessed, and it certainly reads as though her obsession was earnest.
Rather, it seems to me that Charlotte did identify with a kind of fundamental androgyny, which was, for the most part, quintessentially female. The kinds of distinctions we might draw today between "trans women" and "trans men" simply didn't compute with her, on a deep level. Joan of Arc really was her role model; that was no lie.
In the first translation here, Charlotte's unpublished autobiographical manuscript, it is not genitals that make one a woman of society. (Although Charlotte still allows no doubt that, in the world of her writing, she had a vagina.) Rather, it is overwhelmingly dress and mannerism. So as much as this is a book about religion, the first half of this book is very much about fashion too. Rose Bertin, dressmaker of Marie-Antoinette and so-called "grandmother of haute couture," addresses Charlotte for some 70 pages, acting as her spiritual guide into ladyhood almost as Virgil guided Dante up to heaven in the Divine Comedy:
Mademoiselle Bertin said: "Do not worry... I will have the time to accustom you to the patience required by your toilette. Soon it will become as natural for you as it is for your exalted patroness Marie Antoinette."
"Since Mademoiselle Bertin was in charge of my wardrobe, my hair, and my jewelry, and since the King was so generous as to pay the expenses, I cannot be accused of any sin."
While the dialogue is no doubt fictionalized here, this connection was real enough. 161 pages of letters exchanged between Rose and Charlotte have been documented, though they have since been lost. Rose probably knew Charlotte's big lie, but embraced it, which is highly suggestive about the role of modern fashion in transgender life.
More recent work in the archive has shown Charlotte was buying stays and corsets for herself as early as 1774. Much later, in poverty, she clearly took a feminist position around clothing and female self-determination:
"Whether I am praised or blamed, a woman in every country has the freedom to dress as she pleases and to choose her finery, her makeup, or her writing according to her taste and fantasy, without worrying much about the fashionable styles of Mademoiselle Bertin."
She would even defend the ability of women to become Pope!
In other words, in her ideal framing, clothing makes a lady, but self-concept makes a woman, while genitals are addressed only begrudgingly. There's a clear ambivalence Charlotte has about being a "lady of the court," with its holy waters; while she felt high station befitted her, part of her still longed to be "the maiden of Tonnerre," the wine-making province of her birth, where "all the girls have as warlike a spirit as the boys." In her last, post-revolutionary years as a poor woman exiled in England, she got the worst of both worlds. The result was an often contradictory rhetoric of womanhood, with Charlotte discussing "the freedom of my slavery," and other such baffling circumlocutions.
Between these curious turns of phrase, the literal fabrications, the outrageousness of the life described, and the insular religiosity of much of the text, many have reached the conclusion that Charlotte D'Eon was insane. This judgment was current in her own time, during her political scandals even before her gender transition, with one French periodical noting in 1764 that "the indignity of his procedure, the incongruity of his conduct and his style in his account, indicates either evil or madness." And it remains, to a lesser extent, in contemporary accounts, with the 2009 popular French biography from Évelyne and Maurice Lever laying an entertaining emphasis on the Chevalière's "follies" and "madness."
I can certainly understand these perspectives. Reading this book is nothing at all like reading transgender biographies today -- there's the same transition narrative, but they're just not weird enough. If it reminds me of any work around that category, it actually would be Daniel Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness from 1903, with its similarish time period, idiosyncratic Christian spirituality, internally contradictory wordplay, confused dialectic between personal liberty and complete submission of the will, and personal testimony which baldly contradicts the vast surrounding body of clinical literature.
But how could you not be a little insane, after all, to do the things Schreber and D'Eon did, way back when they did them? And, after all, would that be so bad? One could, with the benefit of hindsight, call insanity something else: their personal genius.
If you're reading this, I expect you already understand the basic outlines of the Charlotte D'Eon mythology: an early modern French bureaucrat who was "like" a trans woman, receiving legal recognition as female from the king in 1777. Always androgynous, upon death in 1810 she was attested male by anatomists, so shocked they even produced an etching of the genitals of her corpse, you know, "for science." She left thousands and thousands of pages of notes and letters and receipts, of which this is a small but vital selection. Technically speaking, the endnotes are sufficient and the translation is precise, so this review will concern D'Eon's writing itself.
One thing reading this collection immediately dispels is that there is any conceivable way to remedy these disagreements in the historical record. No amount of intersexual magical thinking can mediate between the coroners' reports in 1810 and Charlotte's own multiple references to vaginal inspections and fear of pregnancy, which are insistent enough they give the text a strong odor of "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." While I understand only too well how trans women are regularly depicted as charlatans and frauds, Charlotte really was just lying here. And where there is one big lie, most biographers of D'Eon have decided, there are many little ones.
But -- perhaps it's best for us historians to stop obsessing over anatomy, and start recognizing that Charlotte's thought here was mostly operating on a different level. As a poor and pious Catholic at the end of her life, when most of this autobiographical material was produced, Charlotte, by her own attestation, had "not quitted his bed, his room, or his house nine times during the last nine years." (While generally using female pronouns after 1777, she used both.) Even before this, as a child she attests to a "philosophical diet," to "staying in bed working from day to night." Despite her decades of civil service, including a few active years in the military, Charlotte portrays her life as vita contemplativa, a life of the mind. Her understanding of sex, and everything else, was intensely mental.
In this way her thinking about sex became genuinely out of sync with her times, or at least, the medicine and law of her times. It had a heavy philosophical, later religious character. (On that note, a lot of this translation is Charlotte droning on about virginity and Jesus Christ, and you will have to engage that to get to the transgender stuff most of us are more interested in today.) There's simply too much reverent writing from Charlotte in this collection about women who dressed as men for me to agree with the general historical assessment this "identity" was a knowing masquerade Charlotte picked up to hide that she was really a man dressing as a woman. (The last section of the book is an entire history of women, mostly Catholic saints, dressing as men. To Charlotte, these were her ancestors.) She was obsessed, and it certainly reads as though her obsession was earnest.
Rather, it seems to me that Charlotte did identify with a kind of fundamental androgyny, which was, for the most part, quintessentially female. The kinds of distinctions we might draw today between "trans women" and "trans men" simply didn't compute with her, on a deep level. Joan of Arc really was her role model; that was no lie.
In the first translation here, Charlotte's unpublished autobiographical manuscript, it is not genitals that make one a woman of society. (Although Charlotte still allows no doubt that, in the world of her writing, she had a vagina.) Rather, it is overwhelmingly dress and mannerism. So as much as this is a book about religion, the first half of this book is very much about fashion too. Rose Bertin, dressmaker of Marie-Antoinette and so-called "grandmother of haute couture," addresses Charlotte for some 70 pages, acting as her spiritual guide into ladyhood almost as Virgil guided Dante up to heaven in the Divine Comedy:
Mademoiselle Bertin said: "Do not worry... I will have the time to accustom you to the patience required by your toilette. Soon it will become as natural for you as it is for your exalted patroness Marie Antoinette."
"Since Mademoiselle Bertin was in charge of my wardrobe, my hair, and my jewelry, and since the King was so generous as to pay the expenses, I cannot be accused of any sin."
While the dialogue is no doubt fictionalized here, this connection was real enough. 161 pages of letters exchanged between Rose and Charlotte have been documented, though they have since been lost. Rose probably knew Charlotte's big lie, but embraced it, which is highly suggestive about the role of modern fashion in transgender life.
More recent work in the archive has shown Charlotte was buying stays and corsets for herself as early as 1774. Much later, in poverty, she clearly took a feminist position around clothing and female self-determination:
"Whether I am praised or blamed, a woman in every country has the freedom to dress as she pleases and to choose her finery, her makeup, or her writing according to her taste and fantasy, without worrying much about the fashionable styles of Mademoiselle Bertin."
She would even defend the ability of women to become Pope!
In other words, in her ideal framing, clothing makes a lady, but self-concept makes a woman, while genitals are addressed only begrudgingly. There's a clear ambivalence Charlotte has about being a "lady of the court," with its holy waters; while she felt high station befitted her, part of her still longed to be "the maiden of Tonnerre," the wine-making province of her birth, where "all the girls have as warlike a spirit as the boys." In her last, post-revolutionary years as a poor woman exiled in England, she got the worst of both worlds. The result was an often contradictory rhetoric of womanhood, with Charlotte discussing "the freedom of my slavery," and other such baffling circumlocutions.
Between these curious turns of phrase, the literal fabrications, the outrageousness of the life described, and the insular religiosity of much of the text, many have reached the conclusion that Charlotte D'Eon was insane. This judgment was current in her own time, during her political scandals even before her gender transition, with one French periodical noting in 1764 that "the indignity of his procedure, the incongruity of his conduct and his style in his account, indicates either evil or madness." And it remains, to a lesser extent, in contemporary accounts, with the 2009 popular French biography from Évelyne and Maurice Lever laying an entertaining emphasis on the Chevalière's "follies" and "madness."
I can certainly understand these perspectives. Reading this book is nothing at all like reading transgender biographies today -- there's the same transition narrative, but they're just not weird enough. If it reminds me of any work around that category, it actually would be Daniel Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness from 1903, with its similarish time period, idiosyncratic Christian spirituality, internally contradictory wordplay, confused dialectic between personal liberty and complete submission of the will, and personal testimony which baldly contradicts the vast surrounding body of clinical literature.
But how could you not be a little insane, after all, to do the things Schreber and D'Eon did, way back when they did them? And, after all, would that be so bad? One could, with the benefit of hindsight, call insanity something else: their personal genius.
June 3, 2023
This is a very interesting, albeit sad, book. Mademoiselle D'Eon (aka the Chevalier) was first known as a man, then revealed as a woman, yet upon her death, re-established as male, though she identified as female. Her autobiography is important because it is one of the first accounts of a trans person's life, her experience being found out, and her wrestling with who she was through the lens of religion ( noting incorrectly) that Matthew 20:30 says, 'For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.' That she understood this as meaning people would be genderless is something that many contend. D'Eon, whose inner conflict is present on every page, cites this as evidence that while she had (in her view) sinned by wearing men's clothing and pretending to be a man, God would forgive her, as afterward, she took the veil, dedicating her life to Jesus and his principles.
Part one of the book (divided into three parts) details her journey, how her sex was revealed, and the aftermath; part two is her effort to come to peace with who she is through religion. Part two is the most arduous as she often repeats herself, and her thought process is convoluted and sometimes difficult to follow.
Part Three is the most engaging. In this section, D'Eon goes through a list of Saints who disguised themselves as men, their lives, and their importance to religion and humanity. Many of these women joined monasteries, took the tonsure, and lived as hermits enduring incredible deprivations and pain. Fathers often disguised their daughters as sons to avoid them being the object of lust by lascivious men.
In our 21st century, given the struggle for the trans community to not only be tolerated but to exist, this book merits not only a look but strong consideration.
D'Eon lived during the reign of Louis XV (when she was a Chevalier in his army and won many battles) and Louis XVI when her sex was revealed. She escaped the Revolution by living in England and died in poverty. If she had been in France during the Revolution, one must ask how she would have been treated. Given her royalist views and identification as female, the assumption must not be well for the populace at that time was consumed with blood lust; it is a sure bet she would have gone down on the guillotine. The question then becomes, have we advanced any further? And do we as a society reflect the teachings D'Eon clung to (of loving our neighbor as ourselves and the golden rule)? The court of Louis XV knew the truth about her gender but allowed her to continue in the army, and even Louis XVI continued to pay her military pension after she acknowledged her sex. Madame Bertin (the queen's haberdasher) equipped her with the finest dress. Before the Revolution, the court was more generous and tolerant than the revolutionaries during it, and even those today may have been, which brings us to a curious question of the current crisis involving the LGBTQ+ community. One wonders if we have not regressed to the point where those figures of the past would admonish who we are now.
Part one of the book (divided into three parts) details her journey, how her sex was revealed, and the aftermath; part two is her effort to come to peace with who she is through religion. Part two is the most arduous as she often repeats herself, and her thought process is convoluted and sometimes difficult to follow.
Part Three is the most engaging. In this section, D'Eon goes through a list of Saints who disguised themselves as men, their lives, and their importance to religion and humanity. Many of these women joined monasteries, took the tonsure, and lived as hermits enduring incredible deprivations and pain. Fathers often disguised their daughters as sons to avoid them being the object of lust by lascivious men.
In our 21st century, given the struggle for the trans community to not only be tolerated but to exist, this book merits not only a look but strong consideration.
D'Eon lived during the reign of Louis XV (when she was a Chevalier in his army and won many battles) and Louis XVI when her sex was revealed. She escaped the Revolution by living in England and died in poverty. If she had been in France during the Revolution, one must ask how she would have been treated. Given her royalist views and identification as female, the assumption must not be well for the populace at that time was consumed with blood lust; it is a sure bet she would have gone down on the guillotine. The question then becomes, have we advanced any further? And do we as a society reflect the teachings D'Eon clung to (of loving our neighbor as ourselves and the golden rule)? The court of Louis XV knew the truth about her gender but allowed her to continue in the army, and even Louis XVI continued to pay her military pension after she acknowledged her sex. Madame Bertin (the queen's haberdasher) equipped her with the finest dress. Before the Revolution, the court was more generous and tolerant than the revolutionaries during it, and even those today may have been, which brings us to a curious question of the current crisis involving the LGBTQ+ community. One wonders if we have not regressed to the point where those figures of the past would admonish who we are now.
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