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The enigma of the Chevalier d'Éon: the spy who lived two lives
Charles d’Éon de Beaumont, an 18th-century French nobleman and spy, lived 49 years as a man, soldier, diplomat, fencing master and 33 as a woman, as Chevalière d’Éon, after an agreement with the French crown that forced him to wear women’s clothing in exchange for a pension. When the French Revolution broke out, he lost his livelihood and was forced to reinvent himself. Exiled in London, now elderly and poor, he began performing public fencing duels while wearing women’s dresses, turning his own ambiguity into a spectacle. Upon his death in 1810, the autopsy revealed he was anatomically male. More than a biological mystery, d’Éon was a genius of ambiguity who turned his identity into a political weapon and a performance, defying every label of his time and ours.
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