Love Conquers Nothing by Emily Hahn

Author:Emily Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504011105
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

The Bearded Demoiselle

D’Eon

In the golden days before most of us were born, we are told, people were nicer, and had codes of conduct which we moderns have lost. There must have been people who did the dirty work, but they lurked in government basements; they weren’t people one met. In the dear old days before Hitler and Stalin, it is said, snoopers were kept out of everyday life. Somehow I cannot believe this. The fascination children feel for spy stories is not a purely modern phenomenon. The secret agent as a romantic conception has always had his admirers. The secret agent as a citizen in good standing has always found his place, and a comfortable one at that, in society. When I say this I am not thinking of Communist fifth columns, but of that eighteenth-century wonder of France and England, the Chevalier d’Eon.

Like most of the people we are discussing in this book, he was not a happy, contented creature living a good solid family life. Had he been, Burgundy would have kept one more vine-growing gentleman at home in Tonnerre, and London, St. Petersburg, and Paris would have missed a most titillating scandal—I had almost written the most titillating scandal of the century, until I remembered how rich that age is in gossip about the great.

D’Eon was not normal. Nobody is, if it comes to that, but d’Eon was doubly un-normal. Most outstanding figures of history had some mental quirk or bias, but not many of them, as far as we know, were hermaphrodites, whereas there is some reason to believe that our chevalier was. Not that the term explains much. The word “hermaphrodite” covers a variety of types, since the dictionary definition gives a lot of leeway: “A human being, or animal, in which parts characteristic of both sexes are combined.” Well, perhaps that describes the chevalier. Outwardly, he must have looked like a man, though he had unusually full breasts. His parts were masculine and he grew a beard. But he had no love affairs. He seems to have had no ordinary sexual desire at all, unless his behavior regarding Beaumarchais, when he was nearly fifty, indicates anything more than an ability to pretend. He must have been able to imitate feminine characteristics, but for the most part his tastes were what used to be called manly—smoking, drinking, swaggering, dueling, and all the rest. There was certainly nothing of the delicate mama’s boy about the young d’Eon.

Strangely enough, the mystery of his sex has remained stubbornly alive. In actual fact it should have been killed long ago, immediately after his own death, when plenty of responsible witnesses (who knew nothing about hermaphrodites) examined the corpse and announced that this difficult creature, after long years of pretense, was indubitably a male. That should have settled it, and would have, had the world wanted it settled. But the world did not. People like mystery. They follow the hard way from choice, not necessity. It excites them. There was

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