cahn

Background: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.

Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mildred_of_midgard

This is the first installment of my write-up on the Chevalier d'Eon based on the biography by Gary Kates' Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman. The book was an informative read, but veeeery much a product of its time, which is 1995 (preface added in 2001). The author is actually surprisingly liberal for that period, but, well, here's his take:

At first, I thought that d'Eon must have been Europe's first transsexual, the victim of a disorder that certain psychiatrists label gender dysphoria. I assumed that today he would have been a prime candidate for sex reassignment surgery. Indeed, since the 1920s communities of transsexuals and transvestites have thought of d'Eon as their patron saint. However, several conversations with a psychiatrist who had worked in a gender identity clinic convinced me that d'Eon was not sick. He did not hate himself. He did not hate his body. He did not think that he was trapped in the wrong body. But if d'Eon was not a transsexual, then, well, what was he? Of course, my book argues that d'Eon came to a cognitive decision that it was best for him to live life as a woman.

Kates then uses that argument to conclude that he doesn't need to respect d'Eon's pronouns, and decides the most useful approach to writing about d'Eon is to use masculine pronouns, in order to emphasize to the reader that the subject of this bio was not a transgender ("transsexual") woman, but a man, full stop.

Now, I was certainly not any more well informed than this in 2001, but since it's 2023 and discourse has moved on, I had to decide what to do about pronouns. At first I was going with what the Mob AU fanfic author did, which was conclude that we have no idea what the Chevalier d'Eon would have wanted, because we're not in a position to ask the right questions, so she uses they/them. But after reading this book (I think the Mob AU author has only read Wikipedia), it seems like–assuming this book is more accurate than Wikipedia–the Chevalier d'Eon did not go back and forth between presenting as a man and a woman, but switched from presenting as a man to presenting as a woman, and subsequently lived and died as a woman. So I'm going to use "she/her" pronouns.

However, since I've told this story using dialogue, characters are going to use whatever pronouns they would have used at a given time, both for accuracy and because their decisions make no sense if you don't understand how they were perceiving this individual.

I'm also, because Kates presents the Chevalier d'Eon as an unreliable narrator who was consciously refashioning her narrative to her advantage, going to allow Kates to argue with the Chevalier in this write-up. I will also be interrupting the narrative a lot myself. :D

Here goes! The story of the Chevalier d'Eon (1728-1810).

*********

Chevalier d'Eon: We'll begin in medias res. The most interesting part of my story is when I was sent as a French secretary to the envoy in St. Petersburg in 1756. The head of the King's Secret, the Prince de Conti–

Mildred: Salongoers may remember him as the Comte de Broglie's unofficial boss, who gave him orders that contradicted the orders from his official boss, the French foreign minister. Conti was the guy who wanted the Polish throne after August III died, and the King's Secret was invented to try to put him there.

Chevalier d'Eon: The Prince de Conti wanted Elizaveta of Russia's help getting the Polish throne, but Russia and France had always been rivals for influence in Poland.

Mildred: As you may recall from the first installment of my 1764-1772 write-up.

Chevalier d'Eon: So Conti proposed that Louis and Elizaveta should strike up a correspondence to overcome their mutual suspicion. Elizaveta was down with this, but her command of French was weak. So she asked Conti to send her a young lady "neither too young, nor too old, [but ] honest, well-informed, prudent, and discreet" to act as her tutor, and to encipher the letters with a secret diplomatic code.

Chevalier d'Eon: The Prince de Conti, who knew I was a woman in disguise as a man, realized I had all the qualifications, so he asked me to readopt my feminine identity and interact with Elizaveta as a lady. I thus had two trunks of clothes during my diplomatic stint in Russia, one for my masculine presentation, and one for my feminine presentation.

Kates: Lies! You invented that story in the 1770s, when you decided you wanted to be able to live as a woman in France but still wear men's clothes and participate in the military and diplomatic service. So you needed to make up a story about how the government had authorized you to do it before.

Chevalier d'Eon: How dare you call my honesty into question?

Kates: There is no record of any gender shenanigans in any of the correspondence for the King's Secret in the 1760s. Nor did you mention it in any of your writings from the 1760s.

19th century Duc de Broglie: Yeah, I reviewed all the documents when the French foreign ministry made the papers available and I was writing my book, and there is no contemporary evidence for this episode, though later historians will uncritically cite it as fact.

Kates: Now. Begin your story at the beginning, Chevalier.

Chevalier d'Eon: Well, my father wanted a son, but he got a girl instead. So he decided to raise me as a boy–

Kates: More lies! You got your mother and sister to cover for you out of love, once you decided you wanted to present as a woman, but when you wrote to your doctor, who had seen you naked, you didn't even pretend you were a woman to him. You even joked about impregnating his wife.

Chevalier d'Eon: No chance I was intersex?

Kates: Nope. Later historians notwithstanding, that was all unfounded rumors. How do I know? When you died in 1810, your flatmate, an old lady who thought you were female too, was washing your body for burial and was shocked to discover you were a man. So she brought in the authorities, who sent a dozen people, including a professor of anatomy, two surgeons, a lawyer, and a journalist, to inspect your corpse. They signed testimonies affirming that you had a perfectly normal penis! In fact, all your anatomy was within the range of normal for a man, even if your Adam's apple didn't protrude.

Kates: Now. Begin again.

Chevalier d'Eon: Fine. The interesting part of my story begins with the King's Secret. My biggest patron was the Comte de Broglie, who ran the King's Secret for a while, before he got in trouble and got exiled. I really was sent to St. Petersburg as a secretary in 1756, as the Seven Years' War was breaking out, and I really did help Elizaveta with her correspondence with Louis XV. In fact, I made many daring trips between St. Petersburg and Paris, carrying secret correspondence concealed inside a copy of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois. I didn't disguise myself as a woman, although Elizaveta was famous for her cross-dressing balls.

Kates: And what was unusual about her balls was that normally in the 18th century, if one cross-dressed at an event–

Mildred: Like when Fritz dressed up as a widow for Carneval in 1733!

Kates: –one wore a mask. One was in disguise as someone else, and half the fun was trying to guess who was who. Elizaveta, in contrast, just made people cross-dress as *themselves*, unmasked. That may have given you some ideas, Monsieur Chevalier. But it's not true that you had one trunk of women's clothes and one trunk of men's clothes in Russia, and you operated out of one to consistently present as female to Elizaveta and the other to present as a man when acting as a spy and diplomat.

Chevalier d'Eon: At any rate, I remained in Russia through most of the Seven Years' War, and became so recognized as an expert on local affairs that when Elizaveta died, the Comte de Broglie and Louis XV asked me to explain the political situation.

From:

cahn

Ah, fascinating!

Salongoers may remember him as the Comte de Broglie's unofficial boss

Well, I do now :P Thanks for the reminder!

Chevalier d'Eon: Well, my father wanted a son, but he got a girl instead. So he decided to raise me as a boy–

Is this the Chevalier telling her story in memoirs? Or some other documentation?

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Well, I do now :P Thanks for the reminder!

That's why I included the reminder: I thought salongoers might *not* remember him!

Is this the Chevalier telling her story in memoirs? Or some other documentation?

The Chevalier, yeah. But memoirs weren't the only place she constructed her narrative; she forged *all kinds* of documentation to back up her "I was a woman before and you were okay with it!" story. I tracked down her papers in the archives (they're at the University of Leeds), and the description on the website says:

This archive is especially difficult to handle. It contains many forged reports, letters, bills, accounting sheets, etc. D'Eon even produced fake authenticity letters to certify that forged documents were genuine.

Things like receipts for women's clothes supposedly dating from before 1770, etc. I'm actually not sure if there's anything relating to her supposed childhood as a girl being raised as a boy, but definitely a bunch of stuff from her time in Russia and England.

D'Eon even produced fake authenticity letters to certify that forged documents were genuine.

Kates: See, this kind of thing is why I'm 100% sure you were capable of being the one who started the rumors about your gender in 1770 and then pretended to be shocked and horrified.