D’Eon left London on August 13, 1777, and embarked for France the same
night. However glad he was to return to his native land, and to revisit
his home and his fertile, vine-bedecked Burgundy, his meditations cannot
have been free from bitterness. Fifteen years had passed since his last
journey: at that time he was the Duc de Nivernais’ “little d’Eon,”
the Comte de Choiseul’s protégé, and was bringing to Versailles the
ratifications of an important treaty. His wallet was not so full of state
papers as his heart of dreams and expectations. Fortune smiled upon his
ardent youth, bringing him brilliant rewards and giving him glimpses of a
promising future. He had been well received at Versailles, honoured with
the notice of Madame de Pompadour, and had returned to London wearing the
Cross of Saint Louis on his breast. Shortly afterwards he was appointed
minister plenipotentiary, and, thanks to a temporary vacancy, had
represented his sovereign most pompously for two months at the embassy.
He experienced at that time the rapture of triumph, but immediately
afterwards all the rancour of a sudden disgrace. First came the harassing
proceedings and the disdainful attitude of the Comte de Guerchy; then a
struggle full of snares and subtilties; and finally the bold stroke of
the action brought against his rival, and his exultation at the scandal
caused by the condemnation of the ambassador of France. But it was a
perilous victory fraught with danger, which had roused the indignation
of Paris and Versailles, and occasioned his desertion by the King and,
successively, by all his powerful friends. Struggles and vicissitudes had
been his lot, reducing him by degrees to despair, and finally inciting
him to that expedient—suggested by the tenacious idea of the public—long
contemplated, and more than once rejected before being finally adopted.
He was now returning vanquished. The “little d’Eon,” once so petted by
the Marquis de L’Hospital, whom the Duc de Choiseul had introduced to
the Duc de Nivernais as a “very good-looking fellow,” on account of his
blue eyes with their bold and intelligent look and his slender but supple
and well-proportioned figure, was now a man of fifty, with an awkward
gait and a harsh voice; his firm chin displayed the stubbly growth of an
ill-shaven black beard. He had kept the manners and style of a dragoon
as well as the uniform; that beloved grey uniform, with red cuffs and
facings, which he never consented to lay aside during his residence
in London, and which made him a figure familiar alike to ministers of
state and to the man in the street. He was naturally as reluctant to
assume feminine attire as he was to resign himself to the manner of life
conformable to his new sex. Notwithstanding the strange document in which
he had formally acknowledged his womanhood, he desired to remain a man
at least in so far as dress was concerned, and endeavoured to induce the
Comte de Broglie to relent on that point. He averred that his fondest
hope was to continue his military career in the army, where, thanks to
his good conduct, he had never offered a bad example to anybody; but at
the same time he expressed his readiness to comply with all the King’s
orders, whether his Majesty commanded him to live in the world dressed in
mob-cap and petticoats, or even to “retire into a convent and cover his
dragoon’s head with the sacred veil.”
How much sincerity was there in these bombastic declarations? Did he
realise, in a last lucid interval, that the loss of his dragoon’s uniform
involved the ruin of all the noble aspirations of his youth, wantonly
sacrificed to an inordinate, and henceforward vain, ambition? Does this
unwavering attachment to the symbol of discipline and a regular career
betoken a last regret for the secure and honourable existence that would
have been his had he but bridled his desires? Perhaps; but possibly it
was merely another pretence, an indirect means of prolonging an ambiguous
situation and of imposing on the world at large. The decision of the
English courts and the command of the King of France had made a woman of
him; but the reluctance he showed to assuming the garments of his new
sex tended to confirm the opinion of those who still considered him a
man. By declaring so openly that he was being compelled to wear female
apparel d’Eon evidently intended to convey the impression that the sex
was as distasteful to him as the garb, and that the King’s will, to
which he must perforce submit, could in no degree modify nature. He thus
averted the difficulties of the moment, while preparing the way for a
reappearance in male attire at some future date. Voltaire alone, among
his contemporaries, appears to have seen through the pretence, to which
he does justice by a somewhat unkind comparison: “I cannot believe,”
he writes from Ferney to the Comte d’Argental, “that the Chevalier or
the Chevalière d’Eon, whose chin is adorned with a very thick and very
prickly black beard, is a woman. I am inclined to think that he has
carried the eccentricity of his adventures to the point of aspiring to
change his sex in order to escape the vengeance of the House of Guerchy,
just as Pourceaungnac disguised himself as a woman to escape from justice
and the apothecaries.”
Moreover, while protesting loudly against the King’s command, by which
his helmet was converted into a mob-cap, d’Eon strove to turn his new
condition to account, and to attain fresh and still greater notoriety
by his metamorphosis. He relates himself how, passing through Saint
Denis, on his way to Versailles, he made Dom Boudier lead him to the
mother-superior of the Carmelite convent, no less a person than Madame
Louise de France. Before drawing the curtains of the parlour the daughter
of Louis XV. asked, it is said, how Mademoiselle d’Eon was dressed, and
on being told that she was still in riding-boots and uniform, having
only just arrived from London, “Madame Louise exhorted her invisible
interlocutor to assume the attire and to lead the life of a Christian
woman.” However, notwithstanding the wise counsel of the venerable
princess, and in spite of the formal condition imposed by Vergennes in
his letter of July 12, it was only at Versailles, where he arrived
equipped as a dragoon, that d’Eon finally yielded, and complied with an
order which was renewed in the following terms:—