Introduction

Cross-dressing author, envoy, soldier and spy, Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual career fascinated his contemporaries and continues to attract historians, novelists, playvtrights, filmmakers, image makers, cultural theorists and those concerned with manifestations of the extraordinary. D'Eon's significance as a historical figure was already being debated more than 45 years before his death. In 1763, a hostile writer predicted that d'Eon's memory would be associated with dishonour and scandal for both himself and France: 'Il outrage la France jusques dans les siecles a venir.'... Le Livre du Plenipotentiare [i.e. d'Eon's Lettres, mlimoires et nligociations] sera un monument eternel de Ia division des Ministres Francois ... Les Historiens diront que son administration etoit mauvaise ... que dans cette Cour tout etoit livre a la cabale eta la prevention. Les Annales d'Angleterre citeront ces endroits, pour ... le Tableau de la France sous le regne de Louis XV. Cest ainsi que le plus petit mortel deshonore souvent un grand Etat, et le fletrit jusques dans la derniere posterite. [He outrages France right up to centuries to come: ... The book of the Plenipotentiary will be an eternal monument to the division of French ministers ... Historians will say that its administration was bad ... that in that Court everything was given up to faction and prejudice. The Annals of England will cite those places for ... the picture of France under the reign of Louis XV. This is how the smallest of mortals often dishonours a great State, and blackens it for the whole of posterity.]