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Chevalier D'Eon

IN all the range of doubtful personalities there is hardly any one whom convention has treated worse than it has the individual known in his time-and after-as The Chevalier d'Eon. For about a hundred and fifty years he has been written of-and spoken of for the first half century of that time-simply as a man who masqueraded in woman's clothes. There seems to be just sufficient truth in this to save certain writers on the subject from the charge of deliberate lying-a record which, even if it is to be posthumous, no man of integrity aims at; but it is abundantly evident that the rumour, which in tine became a charge, was originally set on foot deliberately by his political enemies, who treated him and his memory without either consideration or even the elements of honourable truth. To begin with, here are the facts of his long life.