Part 12 (1/2)

By 1759 Eleanor was, perhaps, weary of conspiring. Her daughter, the Princesse de Ligne, was the fair patroness of that expedition which Hawke crushed in Quiberon Bay, while Charles received the news at Dunkirk.

All was ended. For seventy-two years the Oglethorpe women had used their wit and beauty, through three generations, for a lost cause.

They were not more lucky, with the best intentions, than Eleanor's grandson, the Prince de Lambesc. With hereditary courage he rescued an old woman from a burning cottage, and flung her into a duck-pond to extinguish her blazing clothes. The old woman was drowned!

Not long ago a lady of much wit, but of no occult pretensions, and wholly ignorant of the Oglethorpes, looked over Westbrook Place, then vacant, with the idea of renting it. On entering it she said, 'I have a feeling that very interesting things have happened here'! Probably they had.[40]

[Footnote 40: The facts are taken from Ailesbury's, de Luynes', Dangeau's, and d'Argenson's _Memoirs_; from Boyer's _History_, and other printed books, and from the Newcastle, Hearne, Carte, and Gualterio MSS. in the Bodleian and the British Museum.]

XI

_THE CHEVALIER D'eON_

The mystery of the Chevalier d'eon (1728-1810), the question of his s.e.x, on which so many thousand pounds were betted, is no mystery at all. The Chevalier was a man, and a man of extraordinary courage, audacity, resource, physical activity, industry, and wit. The real mystery is the problem why, at a mature age (forty-two) did d'eon take upon him, and endure for forty years, the travesty of feminine array, which could only serve him as a source of notoriety--in short, as an advertis.e.m.e.nt? The answer probably is that, having early seized opportunity by the forelock, and having been obliged, after an extraordinary struggle, to leave his hold, he was obliged to clutch at some mode of keeping himself perpetually in the public eye. Hence, probably, his persistent a.s.sumption of feminine costume. If he could be distinguished in no other way, he could s.h.i.+ne as a mystery; there was even lucre in the pose.[41]

[Footnote 41: The most recent work on d'eon, _Le Chevalier d'eon_, par Octave Homberg and Fernand Jousselin (Plon-Nourrit, Paris, 1904), is rather disappointing. The authors aver that at a recent sale they picked up many MSS. of d'eon 'which had lain for more than a century in the back shop of an English bookseller.' No other reference as to authenticity is given, and some letters to d'eon of supreme importance are casually cited, but are not printed. On the other hand, we have many new letters for the later period of the life of the hero. The best modern accounts are that by the Duc de Broglie, who used the French State archives and his own family papers in _Le Secret du Roi_ (Paris, 1888), and _The Strange Career of the Chevalier d'eon_ (1885), by Captain J. Buchan Telfer, R.N. (Longmans, 1885), a book now out of print. The author was industrious, but not invariably happy in his translations of French originals. D'eon himself drew up various accounts of his adventures, some of which he published. They are oddly careless in the essential matter of dates, but contain many astounding genuine doc.u.ments, which lend a sort of 'doubtsome trust' to others, hardly more incredible, which cannot be verified, and are supposed by the Duc de Broglie to be 'interpolations.' Captain Buchan Telfer is less sceptical. The doubtfulness, to put it mildly, of some papers, and the pretty obvious interpolations in others, deepen the obscurity.]

Charles d'eon was born on October 7, 1728, near Tonnerre. His family was of _chetive n.o.blesse_, but well protected, and provided for by 'patent places.' He was highly educated, took the degree of doctor of law, and wrote with acceptance on finance and literature. His was a studious youth, for he was as indifferent to female beauty as was Frederick the Great, and his chief amus.e.m.e.nts were fencing, of which art he was a perfect master, and society, in which his wit and gaiety made the girlish-looking lad equally welcome to men and women. All were fond of 'le pet.i.t d'eon,' so audacious, so ambitious, and so amusing.

The Prince de Conti was his chief early patron, and it was originally in support of Conti's ambition to be King of Poland that Louis XV.

began his incredibly foolish 'secret'--a system of foreign policy conducted by hidden agents behind the backs of his responsible ministers at Versailles and in the Courts of Europe. The results naturally tend to recall a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera of diplomacy. We find magnificent amba.s.sadors gravely trying to carry out the royal orders, and thwarted by the King's secret agents. The King seems to have been too lazy to face his ministers, and compel them to take his own line, while he was energetic enough to work like Tiberius or Philip II. of Spain at his secret Penelope's task of undoing by night the warp and woof which his ministers wove by day. In these mysterious labours of his the Comte de Broglie, later a firm friend of d'eon, was, with Tercier, one of his main a.s.sistants.

The King thus enjoyed all the pleasures and excitements of a conspirator in his own kingdom, dealing in ciphered despatches, with the usual cant names, carried in the false bottoms of snuff-boxes, precisely as if he had been a Jacobite plotter. It was entertaining, but it was not diplomacy, and, sooner or later, Louis was certain to be 'blackmailed' by some underling in his service. That underling was to be d'eon.

In 1755 Louis wished to renew relations, long interrupted, with Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, the lady whom Prince Charlie wanted to marry, and from whose offered hand the brave James Keith fled as fast as horses could carry him. Elizabeth, in 1755, was an ally of England, but was known to be French in her personal sympathies, though she was difficult of access. As a messenger, Louis chose a Scot, described by Captain Buchan Telfer as a Mackenzie, a Jesuit, calling himself the Chevalier Douglas, and a Jacobite exile. He is not to be found in the _Dictionary of National Biography_. A Sir James and a Sir John Douglas--if both were not the same man--were employed as political agents between the English and Scottish Jacobites in 1746, and, in 1749, between the Prince and the Landgrave of Hesse. Whatever the true name of the Douglas of Louis XV., I suspect that he was one or the other of these dim Jacobites of the Douglas clan. In June 1755 this Chevalier Douglas was sent by Louis to deal with Elizabeth. He was certainly understood by Louis to be a real Douglas, a fugitive Jacobite, and he was to use in ciphered despatches precisely the same silly sort of veiled language about the fur trade as Prince Charles's envoys had just been using about 'the timber trade' with Sweden.

Douglas set forth, disguised as an intellectual British tourist, in the summer of 1755, and it is Captain Buchan Telfer's view that d'eon joined him, also as a political agent, in female apparel, on the road, and that, while Douglas failed and left Russia by October 1755, d'eon remained at St. Petersburg, attired as a girl, Douglas's niece, and acting as the _lectrice_ of the Empress, whom he converted to the French alliance! This is the traditional theory, but is almost certainly erroneous. Sometimes, in his vast MSS., d'eon declares that he went to Russia disguised in 1755. But he represents himself as then aged twenty, whereas he was really twenty-seven, and this he does in 1773, before he made up his mind to pose for life as a woman. He had a running claim against the French government for the expenses of his first journey to Russia. This voyage, in 1776, he dates in 1755, but in 1763, in an official letter, he dates his journey to Russia, of which the expenses were not repaid, in 1756. That is the true chronology. n.o.body denies that he did visit Russia in 1756 attired as a male diplomatist, but few now believe that in 1755 he accompanied Douglas as that gentleman's pleasing young niece.

MM. Homberg and Jousselin, in their recent work,[42] declare that among d'eon's papers, which lay for a century in the back shop of a London bookseller, they find letters to him, from June 1756, written by Tercier, who managed the secret of Louis XV. There are no known proofs of d'eon's earlier presence in Russia, and in petticoats, in 1755.

[Footnote 42: _Le Chevalier d'eon_, p. 18.]

He did talk later of a private letter of Louis XV., of October 4, 1763, in which the King wrote that he 'had served him usefully in the guise of a female, and must now resume it,' and that letter is published, but all the evidence, to which we shall return, tends to prove that this paper is an ingenious deceptive 'interpolation.' If the King did write it, then he was deceiving the manager of his secret policy--Tercier--for, in the note, he bids d'eon remain in England, while he was at the same time telling Tercier that he was uneasy as to what d'eon might do in France, when he obeyed his _public_ orders to return.[43] If, then, the royal letter of October 4, 1763, testifying to d'eon's feminine disguise in Russia, be genuine, Louis XV. had three strings to his bow. He had his public orders to ministers, he had his private conspiracy worked through Tercier, and he had his secret intrigue with d'eon, of which Tercier was allowed to know nothing. This hypothesis is difficult, if not impossible, and the result is that d'eon was not current in Russia as Douglas's pretty French niece and as reader to the Empress Elizabeth in 1755.

[Footnote 43: Broglie, _Secret du Roi_, ii. 51, note.]

In 1756, in his own character as a man and a secretary, he did work under Douglas, then on his second visit, public and successful, to gain Russia to the French alliance; for, dismissed in October 1755, Douglas came back and publicly represented France at the Russian Court in July 1756. This was, to the highest degree of probability, d'eon's first entrance into diplomacy, and he triumphed in his mission. He certainly made the acquaintance of the Princess Dashkoff, and she, as certainly, in 1769-1771, when on a visit to England, gave out that d'eon was received by Elizabeth in a manner more appropriate to a woman than a man. It is not easy to ascertain precisely what the tattle of the Princess really amounted to, but d'eon represents it so as to corroborate his tale about his residence at Elizabeth's Court, as _lectrice_, in 1755. The evidence is of no value, being a bia.s.sed third-hand report of the Russian lady's gossip. There is a mezzotint, published in 1788, from what professes to be a copy, by Angelica Kauffmann, of a portrait of d'eon in female costume, at the age of twenty-five. If these attributions are correct, d'eon was masquerading as a girl three years before he went to Russia, and, if the portrait is exact, was wearing the order of St. Louis ten years before it was conferred on him. The evidence as to this copy of an alleged portrait of d'eon is full of confusions and anachronisms, and does not even prove that he thus travestied his s.e.x in early life.

In Russia, when he joined Douglas there in the summer of 1756, d'eon was a busy secretary of legation. In April 1757, he went back to Versailles bearing rich diplomatic sheaves with him, and one of those huge presents of money in gold, to Voltaire, which no longer come in the way of men of letters. While he was at Vienna, on his way back to St. Petersburg, tidings came of the battle of Prague; d'eon hurried to Versailles with the news, and, though he broke his leg in a carriage accident, he beat the messenger whom Count Kaunitz officially despatched, by thirty-six hours. This unladylike proof of energy and endurance procured for d'eon a gold snuff-box (Elizabeth only gave him a trumpery snuff-box in tortoisesh.e.l.l), with the King's miniature, a good deal of money, and a commission in the dragoons, for the little man's heart was really set on a military rather than a diplomatic career. However, as diplomat he ferreted out an important secret of Russian internal treachery, and rejected a bribe of a diamond of great value. The money's worth of the diamond was to be paid to him by his own Government, but he no more got that than he got the 10,000 livres for his travelling expenses.

Thus early was he accommodated with a grievance, and because d'eon had not the wisdom to see that a man with grievances is a ruined man, he overthrew, later, a promising career, in the violence of his attempts to obtain redress. This was d'eon's bane, and the cause of the ruinous eccentricities for which he is remembered. In 1759 he ably seconded the egregious Louis XV. in upsetting the policy which de Choiseul was carrying on by the King's orders. De Choiseul's duty was to make the Empress mediate for peace in the Seven Years' War. The duty of d'eon was to secure the failure of de Choiseul, without the knowledge of the French amba.s.sador, the Marquis de l'Hospital, of whom he was the secretary. Possessed of this pretty secret, d'eon was a man whom Louis could not safely offend and snub, and d'eon must therefore have thought that there could scarcely be a limit to his success in life.

But he disliked Russia, and left it for good in August 1760.

He received a life pension of 2,000 livres, and was appointed aide-de-camp to the Marechal de Broglie, commanding on the Upper Rhine. He distinguished himself, in August 1761, by a very gallant piece of service in which, he says, truly or not, he incurred the ill-will of the Comte de Guerchy. The pair were destined to ruin each other a few years later. D'eon also declares that he led a force which 'dislodged the Highland mountaineers in a gorge of the mountain at Einbeck.' I know not what Highland regiment is intended, but D'eon's orders bear that he was to _withdraw_ troops opposed to the Highlanders, and a certificate in his favour from the Duc and the Comte de Broglie does not allude to the circ.u.mstance that, instead of retreating before the plaids, he drove them back to the English camp.

It may therefore be surmised that, though D'eon often distinguished himself, and was wounded in the thigh at Ultrop, his claim of a victory over a Highland regiment is--'an interpolation.' De Broglie writes, 'we purpose retreating. I send M. d'eon to withdraw the Swiss and Grenadiers of Champagne, who are holding in check the Scottish Highlanders lining the wood on the crest of the mountain, whence they have caused us much annoyance.' The English outposts were driven in; but, after that was done, the French advance was checked by the plaided Gael: d'eon did not

quell the mountaineer As their tinchel quells the game.