EON DE BEAUMONT, Charles GenevièveLouise Auguste André Timothée d’ (1728-1810), commonly known as the Chevalier d’Eon, a political adventurer, was born at Tonnerre, in Burgundy, on the 5th October 1728. He was the son of an advocate of good position, and after a distinguished course of study at the Collège Mazarin, he became a doctor of law by special dispensation before the usual age, and adopted his father’s profession. He commenced literary work as a contributor to Fréron’s Année Littéraire, and attracted notice as a political writer by two works on financial and administrative questions, which he published in his twenty-fifth year. His reputation increased so rapidly that in 1755 he was, on the recommendation of the prince of Conti, entrusted by Louis XV. with a secret mission to the court of Russia. It was on this occasion that he for the first time assumed the dress of a woman, with the connivance, it is supposed, of the French court. In this disguise he obtained the appointment of reader to the empress Elizabeth, and won her over entirely to the views of his royal master, with whom he maintained a secret correspondence during the whole of his diplomatic career. After a year’s absence he returned to Paris to be immediately charged with a second mission to St Petersburg, in which he figured in his true sex, and as brother of the reader who had been at the Russian court the year before. He played an important part in the negotiations between the courts of Russia, Austria, and France during the Seven Years’ War. For these diplomatic services he was rewarded with the decoration of the grand cross of St Louis. In 1759 he served with the French army on the Rhine as aide-de-camp to the Marshal de Broglie, and was wounded during the campaign. He had ...