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Chevalier d’Eon: diplomat, scandal, and the body that settled the debate

What if a spy’s greatest secret wasn’t in the archives but in the court gossip that followed him for decades? Chevalier d’Eon enters history here as a figure of diplomatic intrigue and public obsession[1].

  • Portrait of the Chevalier d’Eon dressed as a woman with the the Order of St Louis pinned to breast
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In 1755, d’Eon went to St. Petersburg disguised as a woman, serving as a reader of French and secretary to Chancellor Woronzoff’s wife, and the mission helped reconcile the Russian court to French policy[2].

  • Portrait of the Chevalier d’Eon dressed as a woman with the the Order of St Louis pinned to breast
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The intrigue deepened in 1762, when he was sent to London as secretary of the embassy and later appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Great Britain[3].

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After the Peace of 1763, rumors about d’Eon’s sex exploded into wagers, and in 1771 the Court of King’s Bench heard the case before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, with a jury recording that d’Eon was a woman[4][5][6].

  • A figure holding a sheet stands on a pedestal to the left while several women examine the body and a larger group of women on the right watch.
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But this telling comes from The World of Wonders, a nineteenth-century wonder book, not a modern biography, and it ends with the final reversal: after d’Eon died in 1810, an examination of his body proved he was a man, overturning the 1771 verdict[7].

  • Print after Charles Turner, made from the Chevalier d’Eon’s body shortly after his death. Published 14 June 1810.
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