Unlikely Allies Page 5

  Despite its popular success, the book’s publication led to more problems for the chevalier. The British attorney-general charged d’Eon with criminal libel for defaming Ambassador Guerchy. The charges against d’Eon were serious, but they also generated more publicity and increased book sales. On the day the case was scheduled to be heard, d’Eon failed to appear in court, and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield issued a default judgment against him. When the police came to arrest him, d’Eon was not at home. According to one story, possibly apocryphal, the police were informed that he was in hiding at the home of a Mrs. Eddowes. When the police arrived there, they found only Mrs. Eddowes and two other women sitting quietly by the fire. It never occurred to the police that one of the women was d’Eon.

  D’Eon responded to his guilty verdict by charging that Ambassador Guerchy had tried to poison him. D’Eon alleged that he had dropped in for dinner at the embassy one October evening. After dinner with Ambassador Guerchy and Lord Sandwich, he suddenly became tired and experienced a burning sensation in his stomach. As he hurried home from Monmouth House, some men at the front gate tried to hoist him into a waiting sedan chair, but he fought them off and stumbled home on foot instead. When he arrived home, the chevalier fell into bed and slept until noon the next day. D’Eon charged that Guerchy had tried to kidnap him and return him forcibly to France. One of Guerchy’s assistants, Vergy, later admitted that Guerchy had offered him d’Eon’s position as secretary to the ambassador if he would slip opium into d’Eon’s wine, but Vergy had refused. To the embarrassment of the French and British governments, a grand jury at the Old Bailey found d’Eon’s charges credible and indicted Ambassador Guerchy for attempted murder. However, the indictment was suspended by the prime minister on the grounds that because Guerchy was a diplomat, he was immune from the court’s jurisdiction. Guerchy’s butler, who was suspected of administering the poison, fled England. Though the case was never tried, the judgment against d’Eon for defaming Guerchy was voided.

  FRIGHTENED FOR HIS LIFE, and having exhausted his credit, d’Eon now lived in constant fear of assassins and prepared to defend himself. “I have at home no fewer than eight Turkish sabres, four pairs of pistols and two Turkish rifles,” he wrote, warning Louis XV not to pursue him. His paranoia was not unfounded. Louis XV had sent two dozen plainclothes police officers to London for the purpose of capturing the chevalier, and a French vessel waited off the coast of England to bring d’Eon home. Guerchy attempted to take advantage of d’Eon’s growing anxiety by trying to convince the chevalier that his rooms were haunted. Each night ghostly noises emanated from d’Eon’s fireplace. It was not the chevalier’s imagination; the ambassador hired a chimney sweep to stand on the chevalier’s roof and make eerie sounds. The chevalier was not spooked, but he was tired of the harassment. He decided to move into a flat on Golden Square, a tony neighborhood of handsome Georgian houses constructed around a square that was once a mass grave for thousands of plague victims. Though he loved his new rooms, he could not escape his ghosts. Fearing imminent arrest, d’Eon transformed his home into a fortress. He hired a contingent of loyal dragoons from his old company to stand guard inside his house. He hid the secret correspondence Louis wanted under the floorboards. He kept a glowing poker in the fireplace, ready to defend against an intruder, and left his lamps burning all night. He even placed explosives around his home, ready to be ignited if the French police somehow managed to break in. He would rather blow himself up than submit to his pursuers.

  D’Eon was prepared to do anything to remain free, and he knew that he could not survive much longer in London without financial support. His creditors were demanding payment, while, at the same time, he was being offered substantial bribes from the opposition Whigs to provide secrets that would embarrass the French and the British Cabinet. By 1764, d’Eon was desperate enough to threaten to sell to the British his secret papers detailing Louis XV’s plan to invade England. He wrote the king’s secretary that if by Easter the king did not accede to his demands, he would be forced “into the arms of the King of England.” The disclosure of the secret plans was sure to provoke a military response from Britain with disastrous consequences for France. D’Eon warned the Comte de Broglie that “[Y]ou will be determining the fate of the next war, of which I will certainly be its innocent author.” He added that if that happened, “your grand projects, so glorious for the King and so advantageous for France, will turn against you.”

  The king and Broglie knew that d’Eon’s threat was not idle. By now Louis XV was convinced that “d’Eon is mad and perhaps dangerous,” but he concluded that “there is nothing to be done with the mad except shut them up.” The king decided to reconcile with d’Eon. First, Louis XV replaced Guerchy with a new French ambassador, Durand de Distroff, whom d’Eon knew and liked. The king also offered d’Eon an annual pension of 12,000 livres (about $92,000 today). (Even that much was nowhere near enough to cover d’Eon’s extravagant lifestyle.) In exchange, d’Eon agreed to provide intelligence to the king concerning British politics. Ironically, d’Eon’s notoriety had given him greater access to the opposition Whig members of Parliament and increased his value to Louis XV as a spy. Though d’Eon still retained most of the secret correspondence, he showed his good faith by giving the new French ambassador one of the most incriminating letters in which Louis XV instructed d’Eon on the plans for invading England. For a few years, the matter of d’Eon seemed settled. Then something curious happened.

  SOMETIME AROUND 1770 in the fashionable salons in London and Paris and in the corridors of Parliament and Versailles, people began to speculate about d’Eon’s true gender. It is unclear where or how these rumors started. One story was that a Russian princess visiting London saw d’Eon dressed as a man and recognized him as Mlle. Lia de Beaumont; it was the birthmark under d’Eon’s ear that the princess recalled. Even assuming that d’Eon had dressed as a woman in St. Petersburg, it would be hard to believe that the princess, who would have been very young at the time, could have remembered that birthmark. A second possibility is that d’Eon’s rival, Guerchy, paid someone to write a libelous pamphlet that accused the chevalier of being an insane hermaphrodite. A third is that d’Eon started the rumors as a way to discourage the king from having him assassinated, kidnapped, or thrown in prison. Or perhaps under the emotional weight of his estrangement from the king, his enormous debts, and the continuing threats to his life, d’Eon had simply snapped.

  In any event, word reached Paris by the spring or summer of 1770 that d’Eon was actually female. Louis XV, who could hardly be surprised any longer by the chevalier, wrote in October to one of his military officers that “d’Eon is a girl.” The Marquise du Deffand wrote Horace Walpole from Paris that “I almost forgot to tell you that M. D’Eon is a woman.” Rumors quickly flowed from the British upper classes to the commoners. A London paper reported “that a celebrated Chevalier (D’—n) has, within a few weeks past, been discovered to be of a different sex.” Journalists and poets picked up their pens, some mocking and some praising d’Eon’s beauty and strength. Cartoonists sketched d’Eon boxing in her skirts. A flattering poem by d’Arnaud, titled “To a Mademoiselle Disguised As a Man,” appeared in the Almanach des Muses of 1771. A London newspaper reported that d’Eon had confided in his favorite footman that he was a woman.

  Though at first the stories seemed too fantastic to be true, they captured the public’s imagination. In London, where betting on everything was the rage, wagers were placed in popular coffeehouses like Jonathan’s and Lloyd’s, as well as at fancy St. James gentlemen’s clubs such as Brooks’s and White’s, on the question of whether the chevalier was a woman. Newspapers reported daily on the betting, and by March, the odds were even as to whether d’Eon was female. Reportedly, as much as 60,000 pounds (more than $11 million today) was gambled on this question.

  For unknown reasons, d’Eon did not respond publicly to the rumors, which had the effect of confirming the suspicion in the minds of many. Perhaps
he welcomed the publicity, or perhaps he found it too much to answer. To Comte de Broglie, d’Eon wrote privately denying these rumors, which d’Eon attributed to the absence of a normal libido. D’Eon felt “mortified at being what nature has made me, and that the natural lack of passion . . . which has prevented my engaging in amorous intrigues,” would cause people “to imagine, in their innocence, that I am of the female sex.”

  When newspapers reported that d’Eon himself was wagering large sums on the question of his gender, d’Eon finally had enough. He was incensed by this outrageous libel. He might be a woman pretending to be a man and a spy blackmailing a king, but he was no swindler. D’Eon, armed with nothing but his captain’s uniform and a walking stick, appeared at Jonathan’s, and at several other coffeehouses, to confront the stock jobbers who had laid down these bets. He challenged anyone who doubted his manliness to a duel. His appearance that day was a colorful display of male bravado, but it did nothing to quell the rumors. If anything, it only stirred up more interest in the story.

  Was d’Eon really mad, or did he merely want Louis XV to think he was mad enough to publish the king’s secret correspondence? A madman is always too dangerous to ignore—especially when he is in a position as sensitive as d’Eon’s. If that were the chevalier’s plan, it worked. At Versailles, Louis XV and his counselors worried that they would have to find some other way to neutralize the threat that the chevalier posed.

  FIVE

  FIGARO

  Paris, January 1770-April 1775

  The year 1770 began with Silas Deane, age thirty-two, emerging as a leading figure in the Connecticut Committee of Correspondence, and Beaumarchais, at thirty-eight, marrying his second wife, Geneviève-Madeleine Watebled. Geneviève had lost her husband only four months earlier, but she was already pregnant with Beaumarchais’s child. A year younger than Beaumarchais, Geneviève was tall and shapely with a pretty face and long blond hair. She was as lovely and good-natured as she was rich. Her late husband had left her with an annuity that assured her an ample income for the rest of her life. Soon after their marriage she gave birth to a son, Pierre-Augustin-Eugènie, and they bought a grand estate on the outskirts of Paris in Pantin. Beaumarchais still maintained the mansion on the rue de Condé for his two sisters and father.

  Beaumarchais had other reasons to be thankful as well. Since the success of The Barber of Seville and Eugénie, he had become a popular and critically acclaimed playwright. Although his latest play, Two Friends, about the friendship between two business partners, was a flop, some people were already speaking of him in the same breath as his contemporary, Voltaire. While his artistic reputation blossomed, his business investments with his partner Pâris-Duverney were also growing handsomely. Pâris-Duverney had persuaded Beaumarchais that as France rebuilt its navy, there would be a great demand for timber. Taking advantage of Beaumarchais’s connections in Versailles, they jointly formed a logging company that bought the exclusive rights to a lush 2,400-acre forest in the Loire valley. Their lumber business soon became highly profitable. It seemed that this was Beaumarchais’s moment. All at once he held in his hand everything that one can aspire to—domestic bliss, fame, and fortune. And then in an instant it vanished.

  Beaumarchais’s enterprise sparked envy among Louis XV’s idle courtiers and raised questions about the source of his newfound wealth. It was not merely Beaumarchais’s money that ruffled them. The popularity of his plays, which he knew would be controversial, even revolutionary, irritated many aristocrats, who criticized this social upstart for daring to mock the nobility. Though some aristocrats, including Marie Antoinette, admired his pluck and laughed at his jokes, many others were offended by the liberties he took. Beaumarchais could not resist the temptation to poke fun at the powerful, and his wit often landed him in trouble. Once he joked that the king owed more livres than all the minutes since Christ had died. Louis XV was not amused by what he disdainfully referred to as this “clockmaker’s arithmetic.” Beaumarchais’s enemies quietly bided their time until his fortune turned. They did not have long to wait.

  Pâris-Duverney, now eighty-six, was ailing, and Beaumarchais worried that his friend might die soon. Up to this point, they had conducted their business based on trust. Their partnership was founded on their mutual affection, and they had no need for legal documents or precise accounting. Now, however, with a wife and child to consider, Beaumarchais worried that if Pâris-Duverney died, he had no legal right to any of the property they had amassed together. Beaumarchais knew that his friend and patron, who was childless and unmarried, had reluctantly decided to leave all of his wealth to his grandniece. Under French law, this meant that Pâris-Duverney’s estate would end up in the hands of her husband, Alexandre-Joseph Falcoz, the Comte de La Blache. Beaumarchais knew that La Blache lusted after Pâris-Duverney’s money, and he dreaded having to do business with the mean-spirited comte. La Blache, in turn, viewed Beaumarchais as a rival for Pâris-Duverney’s wealth. The comte once exclaimed that he hated “Beaumarchais the way a lover adores his mistress.” Beaumarchais needed to settle his accounts with Pâris-Duverney before the comte could get his hands on Beaumarchais’s money.

  One spring day in 1770, Beaumarchais visited Pâris-Duverney’s palatial home in Paris to discuss the situation. To his surprise he was turned away at the door. It was not like Pâris-Duverney to refuse to see his beloved friend. He wrote to Pâris-Duverney, but received no reply. For days he heard nothing from the man who had been devoted to him for a decade. Eventually he realized that La Blache had moved into the mansion and had made Pâris-Duverney a prisoner in his own home. After days of trying, Beaumarchais somehow managed to smuggle a letter to his old friend. In it, he acknowledged their enduring relationship in an elliptical fashion and asked for his help:

  Read, my beauty, what I am sending you and give me your opinion about it. You know quite well that in an affair of this sort I can decide nothing without you.

  I am using our oriental style on account of the means by which I am having this jewel of a letter conveyed to you. Give me your opinion, and give it quickly for time flies. Goodbye, my love, I embrace you as warmly as I love you. I don’t send you any messages from the Beauty. Her own letter to you will be enough.

  In another letter, Beaumarchais wrote cryptically:

  I wish this may turn out to your mistress’s good. Everything is for the best if she shares your opinion. To express my own would be unbecoming as I should be setting myself between the jealous lover and the well-guarded wife. I think success will be difficult.

  If Pâris-Duverney were the “well-guarded wife,” and his nephew La Blache the “jealous lover,” was Beaumarchais the “mistress”? This confusion of gender roles seems characteristic of Beaumarchais’s correspondence with Pâris-Duverney. Though some biographers have argued that Beaumarchais wrote this way to hide his business relationship to Pâris-Duverney, their business relationship was already well known. More likely, Beaumarchais was writing, as he often did, with affectionate whimsy. La Blache himself may have suspected that Beaumarchais had an improper relationship with his uncle. La Blache sent anonymous letters full of the “vilest insinuations” about both men. What were those “insinuations” ? We do not know, but one possibility is that La Blache insinuated something about the intimate nature of their relationship in order to suggest that Beaumarchais had exercised undue influence over his aged uncle. Regretting the interference of his nephew, Pâris-Duverney wrote to Beaumarchais, “My friend, you are the finest passion of my soul. But I seem to be only your shameful passion.”

  Beaumarchais and Pâris-Duverney set up a secret meeting in March at which they agreed on a settlement of the business. Pâris-Duverney released Beaumarchais from any debts he owed him and signed a promissory note promising to pay Beaumarchais 15,000 livres (about $116,000 today). In addition, he agreed to lend him, interest free, another 75,000 livres (about $580,000) for eight years. The generous terms that Pâris-Duverney agreed to reflected his deep affec
tion for Beaumarchais, but they also proved to be the cause of one of Beaumarchais’s biggest disasters.

  Three months later in July, 1770, Pâris-Duverney died. Beaumarchais felt an enormous loss. Over the prior decade Pâris-Duverney had opened so many doors for him; Beaumarchais could not have imagined the life he now enjoyed without Pâris-Duverney’s support. Years later, in the sweet-scented garden of his Paris mansion, Beaumarchais erected a plaque to Pâris-Duverney’s memory etched with the words, “C’est par lui que je vaux, si je vaux quelque chose.” (“It is thanks to him that I am worth something, if I am worth anything.”)

  Beaumarchais’s grief for the loss of his dear friend and business partner was quickly eclipsed by other more urgent matters. Beaumarchais’s wife gave birth in March, 1770, to a daughter, Aimable-Eugénie, who died days later. Soon after, Geneviéve was bedridden with a high fever and cough that continued through the fall. The doctors diagnosed it as tuberculosis. In November, Geneviéve, too, died. Still mourning the loss of Pâris-Duverney, Beaumarchais now had to cope with the twin loss of his wife and child. (Beaumarchais’s other child, Augustin, also died less than two years later from fever.)

  To add to his anguish, the court at Versailles showed him very little sympathy. Vicious rumors circulated that he had poisoned both of these rich widows—and possibly their husbands, as well—in order to abscond with their estates. In defense of Beaumarchais, Voltaire wrote that Beaumarchais was far “too droll” to murder his wife. In point of fact, since the income from his wife’s annuity terminated at her death, Beaumarchais inherited none of it. His grief from the loss of his wife and son were sincere, and now, when he most needed his friend Pâris-Duverney, he had nowhere to turn.