At the time, the hoax was very generally attributed to a French astronomer, M. Nicollet, a legitimist who fled to America in 1830. He was said to have written it with the twofold object of raising the wind, and of “taking in” Arago, a rival astronomer. But its real author was subsequently found to be Richard Adams Locke, who declared that his original intention was to satirise the extravagances of Dick’s writings, and to make certain suggestions which he had some diffidence in putting forward seriously. Whatever may have been his object, the work, as a hit, was unrivalled. For months the press of America and Europe teemed with the subject; the account was printed and published in many languages and superbly illustrated. But, finally, Sir John Herschel’s signed denial gave the mad story its quietus.
IX. THE CHEVALIER D’EON
In all the range of doubtful personalities there is hardly any one whom convention has treated worse than it has the individual known in his time—and after—as The Chevalier d’Eon. For about a hundred and fifty years he has been written of—and spoken of for the first half century of that time—simply as a man who masqueraded in woman’s clothes. There seems to be just sufficient truth in this to save certain writers on the subject from the charge of deliberate lying—a record which, even if it is to be posthumous, no man of integrity aims at; but it is abundantly evident that the rumour, which in time became a charge, was originally set on foot deliberately by his political enemies, who treated him and his memory without either consideration or even the elements of honourable truth. To begin with, here are the facts of his long life.
Charles-Genevieve—Louis-Auguste-Andre—Timothée d’Eon de Beaumont was born in 1728 in Tonnerre in Yonne, a department of France in the old province of Burgundy. His father, Louis d’Eon, was a parliamentary barrister. As a youth he was so apt in his studies at the Collège Mazarin that he received by special privilege his degree of Doctor in Canon and Civil Law before the age appointed for the conferring of such honour, and was then enrolled in the list of parliamentary barristers in Paris. At first he had been uncertain which department of life he should undertake. He swayed on one side towards the church, on the other towards the world of letters and beaux-arts. He was by habit an athlete, and was so good a swordsman that later on he had no rival in fencing except the Chevalier de Saint-George. In his twenty-fifth year he published two remarkable books. One was on the political administration of ancient and modern people, and the other on Phases of Finance in France at different times. (The latter was afterwards published in German at Berlin in 1774, and so impressed the then King of Prussia that he gave orders that its ideas were to be carried into practical effect.)
THE CHEVALIER D’EON
In 1755 the Prince de Conti, to whose notice the Chevalier had been brought by the above books, asked the king (Louis XV) to send him to Russia on a secret mission with the Chevalier Douglas; and from that time till the king’s death in 1774 he was his trusted, loyal agent and correspondent. D’Eon’s special mission was to bring the courts of France and Russia closer than had been their wont, and also to obtain for the Prince de Conti, who was seeking the Dukedom of Finland and the Kingship of Poland, the favour of the Empress Elizabeth—a difficult task, which had already cost M. de Valcroissant a spell of imprisonment. In order to accomplish his mission, d’Eon disguised himself as a woman, and in this guise he was able to creep into the good graces of the Empress. He became her “reader” and was thus enabled to prepare her for the reception of the secret purposes of his king. In the following year he returned to France whence he was immediately sent again to St. Petersburg with the title of Secretary of Embassy. But this time he went in his man’s clothes and as the brother of the pretended female reader. By this time he had been made a lieutenant of dragoons. He came in spite of the Russian Chancellor Bestuchéf, who saw in the young soldier-diplomat “un subject dangereux et capable de boulverser l’empire.” This time his real mission was to destroy in the mind of the Empress faith in Bestuchéf, who was trying to hold the Russian army inactive and so deprive France of the advantages of the Treaty of Versailles. This he did so well that he was in a position to prove to the Empress that her chancellor had betrayed her interests. Bestuchéf was arrested and his post conferred on Count Woronzow, whose attitude was altogether favourable to France. The gratitude of King Louis was shewn by his making d’Eon a captain of dragoons and conferring on him a pension of 2400 livres; he was also made censor of history and literature. D’Eon threw himself with his accustomed zeal into the service of the army and distinguished himself by his courage in the battles of Hoecht; of Ultrop, where he was wounded; of Eimbech where he put the Scotch to flight; and of Osterkirk, where at the head of 80 dragoons and 20 hussars he overthrew a battalion of the enemy.
No better conventional proof of the accepted idea of d’Eon’s military worthiness can be given than the frequency and importance of the occasions on which he was honoured by the carrying of despatches. He brought news of his successful negotiations for the peace of Versailles from Vienna in 1757. He was also sent with the Ratification of the Treaty. He carried the despatches of the great victory of the troops of Maria Theresa, forestalling the Austrian courier by a day and a half, although he had a broken leg.