By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Born in Livorno in 1717 and first taught his craft in Pisa, Angelo, as he was known, was rich and charismatic. He traveled widely, spending some time in Venice with the painter Canaletto before settling in Paris, where he studied under Teillagory, whose style so influenced him that there was soon no trace of the Italian school in his fencing. A renowned lady-killer, he was competing in Paris when a beautiful Irish actress, Margaret Woffington, threw him a small bouquet of roses. Angelo fixed it over his heart and told the audience, “Sirs, I will defend this precious gift against all comers.” The bouquet survived unscathed, and in 1755 Angelo moved to London with his conquest.

  “The Angel of Fencing,” as he came to be called, won the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke and introduced swordplay to George III and his children. His pupils included the actor David Garrick, the artist Joshua Reynolds, and the radical activist John Wilkes. Richard Sheridan and Thomas Gainsborough were members of his salle, as was Johann Christian Bach (son of the great composer). For more than a hundred years the club was the best in England. Through Angelo, wrote one biographer, “we gain the image of the fencing master as a man of breeding, a combination of teacher, sportsman, historian, artist, scientist and philosopher.”

  In 1763, at the Thatched House Tavern in St. James’s Street, Angelo squared off in a famous duel against the foremost swordsman in Ireland, a certain Dr. Keys. It was a bloodless encounter, intended to exhibit each man’s skill. The Irishman, a jealous rival, ferociously attacked Angelo, who put up a deft defense, not once conceding a hit. As soon as Keys tired, Angelo switched on to the offensive and landed “twelve palpable hits.” From that point on his reputation was assured.

  That same year he bought an impressive building, Carlisle House, in Soho, for his salle, and published his masterwork, L’Ecole des armes, the most lavishly illustrated fencing book since Thibault’s in 1628. It boasted forty-seven full-size copperplates (for which Angelo posed himself) and was an immediate sensation, quickly reprinting four times. It was endlessly plagiarized and imitated but was far from being just a book of pictures: it argued that fencing should be seen as a sport.a

  Angelo was sufficiently famous to crop up in literature. As late as 1940, Rafael Sabatini’s Master-at-Arms makes him a leading character. The tale is set in 1791, and the master, Quentin de Morlaix, enjoys “an income greater even than that earned by the famous Angelo Tremamondo, whose show pupil he had been.” When Quentin receives a challenge from Redas, a rival master, Angelo is on hand to offer advice: “You will gratify him by using the point d’arrêt. And you will add the condition that the match will consist of a single assault for the best of six hits.” The old maestro lays a finger to the side of his nose. “I know what I’m doing, child.” Quentin triumphs, and all of Redas’s pupils desert him for the Morlaix salle.17

  THE OTHER AGENT OF FRANCE’S REVOLUTION, SIR WILLIAM HOPE, was a Scotsman (1664–c. 1730), late deputy governor of Edinburgh Castle, who in 1692 brought out his second edition of The Compleat Fencing-master: in which is fully Described the whole Guards, Parades, and Lessons, belonging to the Smallsword, which outlines the main features of the French school. (Hope was also the principal figure behind a parliamentary bill to establish a “Court of Honor” to resolve quarrels before they passed into duels. The House of Commons was preoccupied with the proposed union of England and Scotland, so the bill never became law.) Hope described the intricacies of fencing with a smallsword and among other things explained how the désengagement, changing from one line of guard to another—“caveating” is his word—began as a defense against an opponent “binding the blade” rather than as a form of attack. He also claimed that the lunge—the “giving in a Thrust or making of an Elonge”—was first taught in 1676 by a French master named Jean Baptiste Le Perché de Coudray. Fencers who believe they are good but rely mainly on force he labels “ignorants” and recommends that they be introduced to “sharps,” practice weapons with a small part of the point exposed, so that they can learn the real level of their competence. “In the end, fencing is systematic,” he wrote; “it is scientific; it is thoughtful. Fencing is control. Everything else is governed by chance.”

  WE COME NOW TO THE FIGURE WHO WOULD HAVE BEEN ONE OF the greatest women fencers of the late eighteenth century—had the world been altogether certain that she was in fact a woman. A contemporary cartoon shows a half woman, in wig and hoops, and half man, with breeches and sword. The mystery of the great swordsman was fomented by scandalmongers and has been variously reported (in no fewer than sixteen biographies). Only at the fencer’s death was the matter of his/her sex finally settled. Secret agent, soldier, lawyer, diplomat, fencer, he/she had spent forty-nine years dressed as a man, the next thirty-three as a woman.

  Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée Déon de Beaumont (“Déon” later being changed to “d’Eon”) was born in the Burgundian town of Tonnerre on October 5, 1728. The young Déon was obsessed with swordplay from an early age and moved to Paris to study law, where he became proficient under the tutelage of Maître Teillagory, the master who would also coach Angelo.

  The descriptions we have of d’Eon in those early years are colorful but inaccurate, as biographer after biographer has sought to add his own palette to what was already a lively story. These accounts seem to agree that d’Eon was not tall and so slender that “his friends declared that they could circle his waist with their hands.”18 He had fine light blond hair and a rose-and-white complexion, with a curved mouth, large luminous eyes, and a determined, almost arrogant thrust to his chin. He was particular and dainty in his manner but perfectly capable of being one of the boys, telling ribald stories and racing about town with friends, drinking and living it up. The one perennial absence was a girlfriend, and as late as 1771 d’Eon confided to the Comte de Broglie that he had “never wished for wife or mistress,” continuing, “I am somewhat mortified to be still as Nature made me and that, since the calm of my natural temperament has never made me addicted to sensual indulgence, this has given my friends in France, as well as in Russia and England, grounds for imagining in their innocence that I was of the female sex.”19

  D’Eon flatters to deceive. A portrait by the pastellist Maurice de La Tour shows an attractive young woman wearing earrings, a velvet ribbon around her neck, and a low-cut dress revealing a full bosom. Possibly Louis XV’s cousin, the Prince de Conti, knew of this portrait, or that d’Eon liked to dress up as a woman—more likely, he was recommended to the King by an influential family friend; whatever the connection, d’Eon was enrolled in the king’s secret service and sent on a mission dressed as a woman.

  “La Chevalier d’Eon,” a portrait by Maurice de La Tour, sometime in the early 1750s. (illustration credit 4.3)

  The notorious Secret du Roi was an extended bureaucracy of great complexity, a marriage of Louis’s innate duplicity with his love of subterfuge. He himself would constantly issue contradictory orders, often on the same day, to his ministers on the one hand and his secret service on the other. In d’Eon’s posthumously published memoirs, put together by an opportunistic journalist, Frédéric Gaillardet, such facts as they possess give a convincing description of the service as a “political and administrative distaff on which all the strands kept getting snarled and tangled into inextricable knots because no hand was strong or expert enough to guide the shaft and spin the yarn into a single thread.” D’Eon was to be involved with the King’s secret service until his death.

  His first mission was successful. In 1755, disguised as a Mademoiselle Lia de Beaumont, he accompanied a Scot called the Chevalier Douglas to Russia. His mandate was to gather information in the absence of any French diplomatic representation at the Court of Saint Petersburg. D’Eon later reported that he served for six months as a lady-in-waiting to the flamboyant Czarina Elizabeth, where he helped make her sympathetic toward France and did his best to thwart a possible treaty with England. The following year he went back to Russia, this time in male attire, and for his deeds
there was rewarded with a commission as lieutenant of dragoons. Soon promoted to captain, he was given command of a company on the Rhine, where he fought bravely over several months in 1761.

  In 1762 he was assigned to London as secretary to the French ambassador negotiating terms for ending the Seven Years’ War, but continued his secret work for the King. Within weeks he had pulled off a sensational coup, having extracted secret instructions from an undersecretary’s portfolio. He was rewarded with the Order of Saint-Louis, thus becoming a chevalier. At thirty-five, he was at the peak of his career and might have gone on to become an ambassador, but for a cruel piece of luck. A new ambassador was sent to London, the snobbish, mean-spirited Comte de Guerchy, whom d’Eon had antagonized during the Rhine campaign by accepting a dangerous mission that Guerchy had shirked. A bitter struggle between the two Burgundians was virtually guaranteed. D’Eon’s position was a strong one. “The fascination of his ready wit,” wrote an early biographer, “the lively and original character of his conversation, his taste for music … together with that genuine talent for the greatly prized art of fencing which had obtained for him the title of Grand Provost, soon made him appreciated and sought after in society.”20 He fenced frequently at the academy of his friend Angelo and posed for several engravings in Angelo’s famous book.

  About this time, rumors began to circulate concerning the chevalier’s gender. Guerchy and his cronies at the embassy were happy to point out the reserved habits of the Chevalier and the absence of romantic intrigues in his life, but by now even disinterested observers mocked his effeminacy. Some said he was a hermaphrodite; ever since La Tour’s portrait it had been known that he liked to dress in women’s clothes and parade in them in the fashionable salles of London. D’Eon did little to set the matter straight—the only proof of his masculinity he was willing to offer was the one he imprinted “in very male fashion on the cheeks of two impertinents.” Otherwise he remained silent. Then in 1769 a Russian princess arrived in London, and confidently asserted she had seen d’Eon dressed as a woman at the Russian court. The rumors gained momentum, especially after one of his breasts was removed to neutralize a mammary tumor caused by a thrust from a foil. It was presumed that only a woman would need such an operation. Nor was the gossip confined to London: d’Eon learned from the papers that the “mystery” of his sex had become the fashionable subject of conversation in the Paris salons. More bets were placed—at least one for £700 ($60,000 today)—and the odds were quoted daily on the London Stock Exchange. Soon, however, the merchants, bankers, and gentlemen of leisure who were wagering became concerned; they had money at stake, yet how was the question to be resolved? D’Eon turned down an offer of £1000 to prove his sex, and plans were made to kidnap him to settle the matter.

  Barricaded in his Soho lodgings, d’Eon became involved in a series of imbroglios: extravagant debts, alleged assassination attempts (he claimed that de Guerchy had tried to poison him), and libel suits. He fired off a barrage of blackmailing letters to the French court, complaining about not being reimbursed for expenses incurred in Russia and England and backing up his requests with threats to publish highly confidential correspondence. At last he triumphed: Guerchy, finally implicated in a plot to have d’Eon killed, was recalled in disgrace, and died a broken man in 1767. But d’Eon could hardly savor his victory, for his state pension of 12,000 francs a year (equivalent to the income of fifteen working-class families) had been rescinded as a result of his blackmail. Nor did the King’s actions help: at one moment he would order d’Eon’s recall and arrest and at the next secretly warn him of these very orders. Eventually Louis’s advisers became convinced that d’Eon had lost his reason. The King himself declared, “I do not believe that M. d’Eon is mad, but he is presumptuous and a very extraordinary person.” He was terrified that his unruly subject would divulge documents in his possession, including instructions to investigate the prospects of an invasion of Britain.

  D’Eon for his part was happy for the King to be alarmed but no longer was he seen at his favorite haunts; he had even deserted Angelo’s famous salle, where he had previously put in regular practice. When he did venture out, he was heckled in the street—he had become the laughingstock of London. It was at this point that Louis XVI ascended the French throne: d’Eon wrote to him saying that he would relinquish the papers in his possession for 250,000 francs. The King pronounced the figure ridiculous, so d’Eon came up with another plan. The dramatist-adventurer Pierre Beaumarchais, future author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, had been approached by the French government to negotiate with d’Eon on its behalf. In May 1775 they met; immediately d’Eon confessed that he was indeed a woman, and Beaumarchais believed him. This may seem incredible, but no less a judge of women than Giacomo Casanova, dining at the French Embassy in 1764, had found himself seated next to d’Eon, clad in women’s clothes, and declared his companion to be “une belle femme.” “The voice is too clear for that of a castrato, and the shape too rounded for a man.”21

  Soon an agreement was reached: d’Eon promised to hand over his papers in return for the payment of his debts and the restitution of his pension. He reasoned that any charges, including the criticisms made of him in French and British society, would be quelled once it was acknowledged that he had been a woman all along. However, there was one further provision: since he was indeed a woman, he would have to declare his status officially and in future wear the clothes befitting his sex. For Louis, d’Eon’s continued appearance as an officer of dragoons was an affront to public decency. After all, a transvestite was a monstrosity, a depraved creature who belonged in a madhouse; but someone who admitted that she had been forced to disguise herself as a male since childhood could count on sympathetic treatment provided she agreed never to dress as a man again. Beaumarchais reported to the minister of foreign affairs, “The positive declaration of her sex, and her engagement to live henceforth in female attire, are the only means of averting scandal and misfortunes. I have been resolute in exacting this, and have succeeded.”

  The caricature of d’Eon, “he/she,” that appeared in the popular press when his sex was in question. (illustration credit 4.4)

  The French authorities had another reason for enforcing this last proposal: Guerchy’s son had sworn to avenge his dead father but he could scarcely challenge a woman; and the French court had no wish to see the young man pitted against a figure who was still one of the finest fencers in Europe.

  Forced by law to wear clothes that all his life he had previously put on at will as an occasional pleasure, the chevalier soon learned that passing for a woman prevented him from fulfilling his obligations as a duelist, which he fervently wished to do. He wrote to the foreign minister, begging him to revoke the decree so that he might fight young Guerchy.

  Unfortunately for d’Eon, the young count’s mother was understandably alarmed at the prospect of such a duel and petitioned for d’Eon to be kept in female apparel. The chevalier was duly told by the foreign minister that he would not be allowed back into France unless dressed as a woman. D’Eon complied, embarking for France on August 13, 1777, having resigned himself to a lifetime in female dress: but he was not above acts of rebellion and was soon imprisoned in the Château de Dijon for wearing his dragoon’s uniform.

  He was now fifty, with an awkward gait and a harsh voice—and quite impoverished. He constantly declared his desire to continue his army career, while simultaneously saying he would follow his king’s commands, even to “retire into a convent and cover his dragoon’s head with the sacred veil.” Taking pity on him, the Queen herself, Marie-Antoinette, ordered that her dressmaker and milliner attend him to see that he was properly clothed. As soon as he received the new garments, the chevalier paraded around Versailles in them, basking in the attention. Only Voltaire appears to have seen through the pretense, labeling d’Eon an “amphibian.” “I cannot believe,” he wrote, “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.”

  In 1785 the French government was persuaded to give d’Eon 6,000 francs to cover his debts in England, and on November 17 of that year he left France, never to return. He moved once more to London, returning to his old home at 38 Brewer Street, and was accepted by London society as an eccentric old spinster with a colorful past. For years, until well after the French Revolution, this odd, muscular figure subsisted on charity. He supplemented his income by exercising another of his talents—as a chess player—taking on the first great world champion, François Philidor, and becoming in the process the first “woman” to play chess in public. A charge of 5 shillings was levied on spectators.

  D’Eon also gave virtuoso displays of fencing. “He-she,” as The Gentleman’s Magazine dubbed him, provided lessons in the art and occasionally fenced in public, several times before the Prince of Wales. His most famous bout, organized by Angelo, with whom d’Eon had gone back into training, took place before the prince at Carlton House in 1787 and was recorded by the caricaturist James Gillray. D’Eon’s opponent was the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the most brilliant fencer of his generation. At fifty-nine d’Eon was nearly twenty years the elder, and was expected to fence in women’s attire: triple skirts, with all their encumbrances. In the heated prose of a d’Eon biographer, we see the initial encounter through the eyes of Saint-Georges:

  Walking slowly, apparently with difficulty, there appeared in front of him a little frail old lady in a rusty black satin gown and white lace bonnet. The only touches of color about the whole amazing little person were the vivid blue of two unfaded, arrogant eyes in the white, shriveled face, and the flame color of a bit of ribbon on the black dress, over the left breast. The crowd craned their necks, tittered and whispered, as the old dame saluted the Prince with a plain, ungraved sword … “The Chevalier! Mademoiselle d’Eon! La Chevalière!” ran the whispers, as the quaint figure turned and saluted.22