WEBVTT - The Double Agent 0:00:00.680 --> 0:00:03.840 Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio 0:00:04.080 --> 0:00:08.400 and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky Listener, Discretion is advised. 0:00:14.280 --> 0:00:19.280 In seventeen seventy one, the London Stock Exchange introduced a 0:00:19.360 --> 0:00:24.120 betting pool at three two odds that the notorious cultural 0:00:24.239 --> 0:00:28.360 figure the Chevalier Dion, whose long resume onto that point 0:00:28.440 --> 0:00:33.000 included stints as a diplomat, spy, soldier and political writer, 0:00:33.880 --> 0:00:38.760 was biologically a woman. This was an actual betting pool 0:00:38.880 --> 0:00:42.839 that people bet actual money on. The interest in the 0:00:43.000 --> 0:00:47.800 Chevalier des Genitalia became so frenzied that for a period 0:00:47.840 --> 0:00:51.479 of time John couldn't leave her home without armed guards 0:00:51.600 --> 0:00:54.800 because of all the strangers who were trying to physically 0:00:54.920 --> 0:00:59.280 rip her clothes off and expose whatever was beneath, presumably 0:00:59.400 --> 0:01:03.880 to their financial advantage. After a year, the betting pool 0:01:04.000 --> 0:01:07.720 was abandoned because no progress was made on actually coming 0:01:07.800 --> 0:01:12.319 up with a determination that was deemed satisfactory. If you 0:01:12.400 --> 0:01:16.480 can possibly believe it, Dion wasn't willing to undergo a 0:01:16.600 --> 0:01:22.080 public physical examination. But Dion's gender expression became such a 0:01:22.160 --> 0:01:25.760 topic of public interest in the eighteenth century that the 0:01:25.840 --> 0:01:29.160 Court of the King's Bench in England, and then ultimately 0:01:29.200 --> 0:01:33.720 the French government would weigh in to issue formal declarations 0:01:33.800 --> 0:01:37.320 that she was in fact a woman and would and 0:01:37.400 --> 0:01:41.679 should be publicly treated as such. The Chevalier Deon is 0:01:41.720 --> 0:01:47.600 one of history's most compelling and confounding figures, sometimes regarded 0:01:47.640 --> 0:01:51.960 as a proto queer figure, the namesake for a number 0:01:52.000 --> 0:01:56.240 of groups that support the transgender community. She is sometimes 0:01:56.280 --> 0:02:01.800 incorrectly recognized as the first openly transgender person in Europe, 0:02:02.320 --> 0:02:06.400 but that declaration is both an oversimplification of the Chevalier 0:02:07.000 --> 0:02:13.000 and a fundamental misunderstanding of gender expression. Throughout history, trans 0:02:13.040 --> 0:02:16.960 people have existed as long as people have existed, and 0:02:17.040 --> 0:02:20.720 certainly the Chevalier Dion would not have thought of herself 0:02:20.840 --> 0:02:24.160 as transgender, nor would she have had the vocabulary to 0:02:24.240 --> 0:02:29.240 do so so. Perhaps understandably, there's plenty of confusion and 0:02:29.280 --> 0:02:33.919 a good amount of disagreement, even among prominent historians about 0:02:33.919 --> 0:02:37.160 the appropriate pronouns to use when we're talking about the 0:02:37.280 --> 0:02:42.000 Chevalier personally. With the research and reading I've done, I've 0:02:42.040 --> 0:02:47.560 decided to use female pronouns continually throughout the episode. Just 0:02:47.760 --> 0:02:52.240 as the London Stock Exchange discovered barring an inspection of 0:02:52.280 --> 0:02:58.600 a now corpses genitals. There's no quote unquote right answer 0:02:58.800 --> 0:03:03.560 for the chevalier biological sex, and to me, even thinking 0:03:03.600 --> 0:03:08.280 along those terms is well a little gross and intrusive, 0:03:08.880 --> 0:03:11.880 not to mention, as you'll find out later on, pretty 0:03:11.919 --> 0:03:15.840 unhelpful in the end. So what we do actually know 0:03:16.040 --> 0:03:19.280 about the Chevalier is that she spent the last three 0:03:19.320 --> 0:03:22.120 and a half decades of her life making it very 0:03:22.200 --> 0:03:25.760 clear on an official and on a personal level that 0:03:25.840 --> 0:03:28.880 she was a woman and wanted to be treated as such. 0:03:29.440 --> 0:03:31.760 It feels like the very least I can do as 0:03:31.800 --> 0:03:34.920 a podcaster telling her story to take her at her 0:03:34.920 --> 0:03:39.760 word there. During her lifetime, the Chevalier was celebrated by 0:03:39.800 --> 0:03:43.160 contemporary feminist thinkers like A. Lump de Gorge and Mary 0:03:43.200 --> 0:03:47.280 wolf Stonecraft. In her vindication of the rights of women, 0:03:47.920 --> 0:03:52.400 wolf Stonecraft specifically include Dion as an example of a 0:03:52.480 --> 0:03:55.400 woman who was able to succeed in a man's world. 0:03:56.000 --> 0:04:00.120 Wolf Stonecraft rights, I shall not lay any great stress 0:04:00.200 --> 0:04:05.240 upon the example of a few women, sappho Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, 0:04:05.320 --> 0:04:09.320 the Empress of Russia, Madame Dion, et cetera. These and 0:04:09.520 --> 0:04:14.360 many more, maybe reckoned exceptions and are not all heroes 0:04:14.440 --> 0:04:18.640 as well as heroine's exceptions to general rules. I wish 0:04:18.720 --> 0:04:23.680 to see women neither heroin nor brutes, but reasonable creatures who, 0:04:23.839 --> 0:04:28.760 from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution. 0:04:30.080 --> 0:04:32.919 The Chevalier's life would have been filled with intrigue and 0:04:33.040 --> 0:04:37.000 scandal and more than a few international incidents, even if 0:04:37.040 --> 0:04:40.839 she hadn't also been a walking example of this strange 0:04:40.920 --> 0:04:45.120 performance of gender, both in the eighteenth century and today. 0:04:46.279 --> 0:04:57.920 I'm Danis Schwartz and this is noble blood. The figure 0:04:58.080 --> 0:05:00.839 who had come to be best known as the Chevalier 0:05:00.920 --> 0:05:04.160 Dion was assigned male at birth when she was born 0:05:04.320 --> 0:05:08.960 on October five, seventy eight into North France, a little 0:05:09.040 --> 0:05:13.520 town tucked into the hills of the wine regions of Burgundy. 0:05:13.839 --> 0:05:17.880 Her being assigned male delighted her father. They were a 0:05:17.920 --> 0:05:23.320 noble family, but noble and poor, a terrible combination. Once 0:05:23.360 --> 0:05:26.960 the Chevalier's father had a son his own air, he 0:05:27.160 --> 0:05:32.440 was entitled to a certain inheritance from his in laws. Physically, 0:05:32.640 --> 0:05:36.920 the Chevalier Deon remained small her entire life, five ft 0:05:36.920 --> 0:05:40.919 and four inches tall, with long legs, blue eyes, and 0:05:41.000 --> 0:05:43.320 a voice that was high pitched enough that it was 0:05:43.400 --> 0:05:47.400 remarked upon presenting as a man as her father's. There, 0:05:47.960 --> 0:05:51.320 Dion studied civil and canon law to become a lawyer 0:05:51.480 --> 0:05:55.640 like her father. She graduated from College Mazzara at age 0:05:55.640 --> 0:06:01.080 twenty one in seventeen forty nine. Over the next five years, 0:06:01.120 --> 0:06:05.280 like many other young, intelligent literary people, Dion made a 0:06:05.360 --> 0:06:09.080 name for herself as a political writer, one successful enough 0:06:09.120 --> 0:06:13.040 that she even gained some notoriety. Her career was also 0:06:13.200 --> 0:06:16.640 enough to propel her into a prominent job working as 0:06:16.640 --> 0:06:20.320 a secretary for a number of high ranking court officials 0:06:20.920 --> 0:06:24.520 and as an official royal censor for history and literature, 0:06:25.200 --> 0:06:29.160 and then ultimately she got a job as the secretary 0:06:29.279 --> 0:06:32.960 of the diplomat sent down behalf of France to the 0:06:33.040 --> 0:06:39.720 court of the Russian Empress Elizabeth. Or at least that 0:06:39.839 --> 0:06:44.880 was what Dion was doing in Russia officially. Unofficially, she 0:06:45.080 --> 0:06:48.359 was working as an agent of the top secret spy 0:06:48.480 --> 0:06:52.280 network known as the Secret of the King or Secrete 0:06:52.279 --> 0:06:56.040 de Rouix. The group was so secret that there were 0:06:56.080 --> 0:06:59.159 officials in the actual government who didn't know what existed. 0:07:00.120 --> 0:07:02.760 The point of the Secrete de Rua was to serve 0:07:02.839 --> 0:07:07.160 the King Louis fift exclusively so that he could operate 0:07:07.240 --> 0:07:12.960 in certain foreign spears without involving France as a whole. Sometimes, 0:07:13.000 --> 0:07:16.000 like in Russia, the task of the Secrete de Rua 0:07:16.440 --> 0:07:21.160 ran contrary to the officially stated French diplomatic goals. The 0:07:21.280 --> 0:07:24.840 king's plan, as Deon later recounted, it was to put 0:07:24.920 --> 0:07:27.880 his cousin, the Prince de Conti, on the Polish throne 0:07:28.200 --> 0:07:31.440 so that Poland could operate as a satellite French nation, 0:07:32.320 --> 0:07:34.920 and so Deon was meant to make nice with embrass 0:07:34.960 --> 0:07:38.640 Elizabeth of Russia, to help foster good relationships with her 0:07:39.080 --> 0:07:43.560 and to undermine Habsburg power in the area. There's very 0:07:43.640 --> 0:07:49.200 little corroborative documentation about Dion's time in Russia, possibly because 0:07:49.200 --> 0:07:52.400 some of it was in a secret capacity, so for 0:07:52.480 --> 0:07:56.040 some details we have to rely exclusively on her own, 0:07:56.560 --> 0:08:01.800 possibly embellished memoirs written later in life. According to Dion, 0:08:01.960 --> 0:08:04.600 at the time she was sent to Russia, the English 0:08:04.640 --> 0:08:08.160 were attempting to restrict French access to the Russian court, 0:08:08.720 --> 0:08:11.920 and so they were only allowing women and children across 0:08:11.960 --> 0:08:15.720 the border. So in order to complete her mission, Dion 0:08:15.840 --> 0:08:18.880 took on the disguise of a woman, a woman named 0:08:18.960 --> 0:08:23.080 Lea de Beaumont, Dion passed as a woman and then 0:08:23.280 --> 0:08:28.520 passed across the border. This is, according to Dion's memoirs, 0:08:28.560 --> 0:08:31.840 the first instance of her publicly presenting as a woman 0:08:32.520 --> 0:08:37.079 for political purposes in this case, but to ultimately positive effect. 0:08:37.880 --> 0:08:41.240 It's also worth pointing out that Empress Elizabeth's court in 0:08:41.320 --> 0:08:45.200 Russia was a place where cross dressing was a common 0:08:45.360 --> 0:08:50.120 and delighted in form of entertainment. The Empress through weakly 0:08:50.240 --> 0:08:54.760 cross dressing parties called metamorphosis balls, in which men arrived 0:08:54.800 --> 0:08:58.920 in petticoats and Elizabeth herself showed off her figure in 0:08:59.040 --> 0:09:03.400 men's riding oaths. As a young future Catherine the Great 0:09:03.480 --> 0:09:07.080 would write of these parties, quote, the only woman who 0:09:07.120 --> 0:09:11.320 looked really well and completely a man was the Empress herself, 0:09:11.880 --> 0:09:15.640 As she was tall and powerful. Male attire suited her. 0:09:16.000 --> 0:09:20.160 She had the handsomest leg I had ever seen. Some 0:09:20.240 --> 0:09:23.559 people say Empress Elizabeth just wanted to throw these parties 0:09:23.600 --> 0:09:28.200 because she was tired of hiding her handsomest leg underneath 0:09:28.320 --> 0:09:34.360 voluminous women's petticoats. By all accounts, Dion dazzled in her post, 0:09:34.600 --> 0:09:38.240 but she was ultimately withdrawn from Russia. When France was 0:09:38.280 --> 0:09:43.120 pulled into a more immediate international conflict, the Seven Years 0:09:43.120 --> 0:09:46.920 War with England, John was made a captain of dragoons 0:09:47.040 --> 0:09:50.960 and fought valiantly, distinguishing herself enough that she was made 0:09:50.960 --> 0:09:54.280 the secretary to the Duke of Vernay and was deployed 0:09:54.320 --> 0:09:57.559 to London to assist in the drafting of the peace treaty. 0:09:57.960 --> 0:10:03.040 When the war ended in seventeen sixty three, Dionu received 0:10:03.120 --> 0:10:06.960 the Order of Salouis and was granted the title of Chevalier, 0:10:07.360 --> 0:10:11.400 the French equivalent of a knighthood. She was only thirty 0:10:11.440 --> 0:10:14.240 five years old, and she was going to continue to 0:10:14.280 --> 0:10:22.720 be incredibly useful to the king. After the Seven Years War, 0:10:23.040 --> 0:10:27.360 France was in fragile condition. It had been stripped of 0:10:27.440 --> 0:10:30.800 its North American colonies, and it was saddled now with 0:10:31.040 --> 0:10:35.800 two things, enormous debts and a hatred of the English. 0:10:36.200 --> 0:10:38.960 The Secrete de Rouix had a new goal to see 0:10:39.040 --> 0:10:41.880 if invading Britain was a thing that might be on 0:10:41.920 --> 0:10:46.000 the horizon. Dion was given a post as a temporary 0:10:46.040 --> 0:10:49.920 liaison to the English court, a short term diplomatic job, 0:10:50.000 --> 0:10:54.320 while the real ambassador to England was being appointed secretly 0:10:54.520 --> 0:10:57.360 on the orders of King Louis the fifteenth. Her job 0:10:57.480 --> 0:11:00.520 was also to scope out the English coast line to 0:11:00.559 --> 0:11:02.760 see if there was a place that would lend itself 0:11:02.800 --> 0:11:07.200 to a French invasion. But our former good soldier Dion 0:11:07.559 --> 0:11:11.880 wasted very little time becoming a thorn in the King's side. 0:11:12.480 --> 0:11:17.000 She had expensive tastes, and she was formally reprimanded for 0:11:17.080 --> 0:11:21.960 importing too much expensive wine on France's dying, which would 0:11:21.960 --> 0:11:25.760 have been troublesome at any time, but was especially impudent 0:11:25.800 --> 0:11:28.800 when France was cash strapped and deeply in debt from 0:11:28.800 --> 0:11:32.360 the war. But Dion was about to cause more trouble 0:11:32.440 --> 0:11:37.839 than just buying wine. Soon enough, the real official ambassador 0:11:37.880 --> 0:11:41.320 to England was appointed, and Dion was politely told to 0:11:41.400 --> 0:11:45.720 vacate the position. The official ambassador was a man named 0:11:45.760 --> 0:11:50.160 Comte de Guerchi, who had almost no diplomatic experience and 0:11:50.240 --> 0:11:55.000 even fewer friends. He was a mediocre bureaucrat, and as 0:11:55.040 --> 0:11:58.240 soon as he arrived, Dion was to be demoted to 0:11:58.320 --> 0:12:02.160 serve as his secretary, even though Dion outranked him as 0:12:02.160 --> 0:12:06.040 a member of the secret In short, it was an 0:12:06.120 --> 0:12:10.000 outrage not to be abided, and Dion said as much 0:12:10.080 --> 0:12:13.120 in the numerous letters that she wrote back to France, 0:12:13.440 --> 0:12:16.200 saying that it was an insult that she was expected 0:12:16.240 --> 0:12:20.440 to vacate the ambassador position for someone as unqualified and 0:12:20.600 --> 0:12:24.600 unlikable as the Comte. Later do All would also write 0:12:24.640 --> 0:12:27.440 that she believed that she was being sabotaged back in 0:12:27.559 --> 0:12:31.880 France by the King's favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who 0:12:31.960 --> 0:12:35.640 was threatened by anyone but her having prominent influence over 0:12:35.640 --> 0:12:39.679 the King. Dion was fired for insolence and given two 0:12:39.720 --> 0:12:42.160 weeks to pack her bags and come back to France. 0:12:43.000 --> 0:12:46.400 At this point, she knew she was in trouble. Poor 0:12:46.600 --> 0:12:49.440 low ranking nobleman could be thrown into the best deal 0:12:49.559 --> 0:12:52.640 for less than what she did. She wouldn't be returning 0:12:52.640 --> 0:12:55.840 back to France for a party with sparkling grape juice 0:12:55.840 --> 0:12:58.920 in the office kitchen, and so de All made the 0:12:58.960 --> 0:13:04.120 decision to just not. She just didn't return to France. 0:13:05.080 --> 0:13:09.600 Louis was outraged, of course, and he demanded that Dion 0:13:09.720 --> 0:13:13.600 be extradited, but the French Foreign Minister just shrugged and 0:13:13.640 --> 0:13:16.000 said that Dion was welcome to stay in Britain as 0:13:16.040 --> 0:13:19.679 a private citizen. The French crown went so far as 0:13:19.720 --> 0:13:23.040 you tried to physically kidnap Dion and bring her back 0:13:23.080 --> 0:13:30.880 to France, all to no avail. Without a country or 0:13:30.920 --> 0:13:36.400 any real political protection, d a made an incredibly risky decision, 0:13:37.240 --> 0:13:42.840 the nuclear option. She published a book of state secrets, 0:13:42.880 --> 0:13:45.719 full of all of her correspondent through her service in 0:13:45.760 --> 0:13:50.080 the secret Dubrois, with plenty of salacious details and the 0:13:50.120 --> 0:13:53.360 promise that this was just the first volume of many, 0:13:53.400 --> 0:13:56.880 that there were even more scandalous secrets on the way. 0:13:58.000 --> 0:14:01.920 It was, like I said, a risky strategy. But when 0:14:01.960 --> 0:14:06.800 that paid off. Without political protection, Dion turned to the 0:14:06.920 --> 0:14:11.880 protection of celebrity and fame, the protective bubble of attention 0:14:12.240 --> 0:14:14.880 and the adoration of the British people for this woman 0:14:14.920 --> 0:14:19.720 who basically just betrayed the French government, Dion became an 0:14:19.760 --> 0:14:25.120 overnight international celebrity, the person everyone was talking about the 0:14:25.160 --> 0:14:28.880 next morning at the water cooler, so to speak. She 0:14:29.120 --> 0:14:33.160 was the main character of European politics for fifteen minutes. 0:14:34.080 --> 0:14:38.080 In Gary Cates's biography Monsieur Dion as a Woman, the 0:14:38.120 --> 0:14:41.760 writer includes a contemporary letter from a sixteen year old 0:14:41.760 --> 0:14:46.680 girl writing to a friend, astounded by Dion's impudence. As 0:14:46.720 --> 0:14:51.240 for Dion's implicit blackmail to spell more French secrets, that 0:14:51.320 --> 0:14:56.000 worked too, because she hadn't included the worst of King 0:14:56.080 --> 0:15:01.600 Louis secrets. Louis the fifteen quietly awarded a lifelong pension 0:15:01.720 --> 0:15:05.680 of twelve thousand livres in exchange for the promise that 0:15:05.800 --> 0:15:10.600 she would withhold the most incriminating secrets, and maybe the 0:15:10.640 --> 0:15:13.480 promise that she would continue to pass along some reports 0:15:13.480 --> 0:15:16.240 on British politics as long as she was over in England. 0:15:22.200 --> 0:15:25.800 Dion was in exile in an uneasy truce with the 0:15:25.840 --> 0:15:29.680 French crown, but certainly not permitted to return to France, 0:15:30.400 --> 0:15:33.400 and so she began her life in exile in England 0:15:33.520 --> 0:15:37.760 as a political celebrity. It's also about now that the 0:15:37.840 --> 0:15:42.160 rumors started, rumors that were possibly started but almost certainly 0:15:42.200 --> 0:15:47.200 fueled by Dion herself, that that scandalous French expat who 0:15:47.200 --> 0:15:50.360 had up until this point presented as a man, was 0:15:50.440 --> 0:15:54.800 actually a woman. This is when the betting pool came about, 0:15:54.880 --> 0:15:58.480 and the hordes of frenzied gamblers, desperate to examine Dion's 0:15:58.520 --> 0:16:02.480 genitalia by assaulting her in the street. Dion, for her part, 0:16:02.600 --> 0:16:06.800 kept coyly mum, continuing to present as a man until 0:16:06.920 --> 0:16:10.600 finally an investigator arrived on behalf of the French government 0:16:11.080 --> 0:16:15.520 trying to discover the truth. At this point, Dion sighed 0:16:15.760 --> 0:16:21.360 and became clean. Yes, she actually was a woman. She 0:16:21.480 --> 0:16:25.400 had been born a woman biologically, but was raised as 0:16:25.400 --> 0:16:29.040 a son because her tyrannical father was desperate to have 0:16:29.120 --> 0:16:33.720 an heir. In seventeen seventy seven, when Dion was forty 0:16:33.760 --> 0:16:37.160 nine years old, the Court of the King's Bench made 0:16:37.160 --> 0:16:40.840 its formal declaration on behalf of the English government from 0:16:40.880 --> 0:16:45.240 Westminster that yes, the figure who had been known up 0:16:45.320 --> 0:16:50.600 until that point as Monsieur Dion was actually a mademoiselle. Quote, 0:16:51.000 --> 0:16:54.920 she who had called herself the Chevalier Dion until that day, 0:16:55.400 --> 0:16:59.120 was an individual who did not possess with the Appalachian 0:16:59.200 --> 0:17:04.680 man promist and that she was quote a virago disguised 0:17:04.720 --> 0:17:08.760 in a uniform. It was actually all part of an 0:17:08.760 --> 0:17:13.480 astonishingly clever roots on the part of Dion, as Hugh 0:17:13.600 --> 0:17:17.400 Ryan wrote for the website Them Dots, By claiming that 0:17:17.440 --> 0:17:20.880 she had secretly been a woman all along, disguised as 0:17:20.880 --> 0:17:25.080 a man, Dion was allowed to publicly transition in a 0:17:25.119 --> 0:17:29.240 way that never would have otherwise been socially acceptable. But 0:17:29.560 --> 0:17:33.360 by framing it as coming clean, not only was her 0:17:33.359 --> 0:17:38.960 transition acceptable, it was celebrated, met with absolutely no loss 0:17:39.000 --> 0:17:43.000 of status. Here she was a good Christian woman who 0:17:43.000 --> 0:17:45.879 could no longer live a lie, who had pretended to 0:17:45.880 --> 0:17:48.760 be a man this entire time in noble service to 0:17:48.800 --> 0:17:53.280 the French king. Now living as herself, Dion's goal was 0:17:53.320 --> 0:17:57.600 to return to France as a heroine. A few years prior, 0:17:57.800 --> 0:18:01.480 King Louis the fift died and his ransom Louis the sixteenth, 0:18:01.520 --> 0:18:05.439 had taken the throne. Louis the sixteenth had no ambitions 0:18:05.440 --> 0:18:08.320 to invade Britain, and he also did not see the 0:18:08.359 --> 0:18:11.919 need for duel foreign services, and so the Secrete de 0:18:12.000 --> 0:18:16.240 rule was abolished and Dion's pension along with it. It 0:18:16.320 --> 0:18:21.000 took fourteen months of negotiation between Louis the sixteenth representative 0:18:21.080 --> 0:18:25.199 and Dia to negotiate her return to France, but ultimately 0:18:25.359 --> 0:18:28.000 the terms were settled with an agreement that came to 0:18:28.000 --> 0:18:32.640 be known as the Transaction, which allowed Dion's return to France, 0:18:32.960 --> 0:18:36.680 stipulating that she would henceforth present as a woman, though 0:18:36.720 --> 0:18:39.280 she would still be allowed to wear the insignia of 0:18:39.320 --> 0:18:43.240 the Order of San Louis. Her title was changed from 0:18:43.400 --> 0:18:48.920 Chevalier to Chevalier, making her the first female knight, and 0:18:49.000 --> 0:18:52.520 even though Dion wanted to continue to wear her dragoon uniform, 0:18:53.000 --> 0:18:56.720 the king wouldn't allow it, and so the transaction also 0:18:56.800 --> 0:19:01.560 provided funds for new outfits from Marie Antoinette's dressmaker, Rose Bertie. 0:19:02.800 --> 0:19:10.439 On November one, Mademoiselle le Chevalier Deon emerged from a 0:19:10.560 --> 0:19:14.680 four hour twilet in an elaborate dress with a powdered 0:19:14.680 --> 0:19:17.920 wig and a face full of makeup to be formally 0:19:18.040 --> 0:19:23.480 presented at Versailles. It was a rebirth of sorts. She 0:19:23.600 --> 0:19:33.480 had returned to France, and she had returned as herself. Unfortunately, 0:19:33.720 --> 0:19:36.800 Dion was about to learn a terrible lesson about what 0:19:36.880 --> 0:19:39.360 it meant to be a woman in the seventeen hundreds, 0:19:40.080 --> 0:19:45.960 In a word, boring. For an unmarried, relatively poor noble woman, 0:19:46.440 --> 0:19:51.520 French court offered very little to do. There was sitting 0:19:51.560 --> 0:19:58.639 around getting dressed, chatting, maybe playing cards for a woman 0:19:58.680 --> 0:20:01.719 who had spent the earlier decades of her life traveling 0:20:01.800 --> 0:20:06.760 the world as an international spy slash diplomat slash enfonte 0:20:06.800 --> 0:20:10.399 reblay of the political world. Being a lady sitting around 0:20:10.440 --> 0:20:15.800 in petticoats was mind numbing. When France joined the American 0:20:15.880 --> 0:20:19.639 Colonies revolution against the English, Deon tried to put on 0:20:19.760 --> 0:20:23.639 her dragoon uniform again and fight. She suggested that she 0:20:23.680 --> 0:20:28.439 could assemble an all female battalion. The French government suggested 0:20:28.480 --> 0:20:32.399 that she joined a convent. She was so insistent in 0:20:32.440 --> 0:20:36.440 her ambitions to join the war efforts that ultimately Dion 0:20:36.640 --> 0:20:39.919 was arrested and then imprisoned in the dungeon below the 0:20:40.000 --> 0:20:44.119 Chateau of Dijon for nineteen days, upon which she was 0:20:44.200 --> 0:20:47.280 released as long as she promised to shut up about 0:20:47.280 --> 0:20:51.840 the whole wanting to go into battle thing. Disheartened, Dion 0:20:52.000 --> 0:20:55.439 returned to England. She said it was just temporary to 0:20:55.480 --> 0:20:58.919 settle some business, but it became fairly clear that she 0:20:59.040 --> 0:21:03.200 had no intention of returning to France. At least in England, 0:21:03.240 --> 0:21:06.359 she was able to escape some of the restrictions of 0:21:06.440 --> 0:21:10.520 the highly rigid French court, and soon she would have 0:21:10.600 --> 0:21:14.240 no choice but to stay in London. The French Revolution 0:21:14.320 --> 0:21:17.520 broke out, and though Dion was safe in England, her 0:21:17.680 --> 0:21:21.159 small pension was lost, as was all of her family 0:21:21.240 --> 0:21:31.800 property Intinair. Now a woman in her sixties, Dion was impoverished, 0:21:32.160 --> 0:21:35.359 forced to sell her possessions and her vast collection of 0:21:35.400 --> 0:21:38.800 books to get by. Her main form of income was 0:21:38.920 --> 0:21:43.840 dawning her full dress and participating in public fencing demonstrations 0:21:44.119 --> 0:21:47.600 where she would best men, but her short career as 0:21:47.640 --> 0:21:51.520 a fencing performer ended at age sixty eight with an injury. 0:21:52.640 --> 0:21:55.800 At this point, for financial reasons, Dion was forced to 0:21:55.840 --> 0:21:59.879 take a roommate, an old widow named Mrs Cole ms. 0:22:00.080 --> 0:22:02.320 This Cole was the one who would go on to 0:22:02.440 --> 0:22:06.399 discover Dion's dead body just a few years after Dion 0:22:06.520 --> 0:22:10.920 was paralyzed from a fall the Chevalier. Dion died at 0:22:10.960 --> 0:22:15.720 eighty one years old, impoverished, though Dion had spent the 0:22:15.760 --> 0:22:18.399 last thirty three years of her life living as a woman, 0:22:19.080 --> 0:22:22.119 Upon her death, Mrs Cole pulled back the bed sheets 0:22:22.440 --> 0:22:26.320 to reveal that Dion had male genitalia, although it was 0:22:26.359 --> 0:22:31.240 also noted that Dion had certain female sex characteristics. None 0:22:31.240 --> 0:22:35.320 of that information feels very relevant or scientific to me, 0:22:35.960 --> 0:22:41.120 but contemporary historians suggest that Dion might have been biologically intersex. 0:22:42.160 --> 0:22:45.360 In the end, that feels far less important and far 0:22:45.480 --> 0:22:49.320 less relevant to the realities of Dion's actual life, the 0:22:49.359 --> 0:22:52.479 way she lived presenting as a man, which granted her 0:22:52.600 --> 0:22:57.720 the access and opportunities of education, and then cleverly pretending 0:22:57.760 --> 0:23:00.000 that she had been a cross dressing man her entire 0:23:00.040 --> 0:23:03.120 her life, so that she could publicly transition and live 0:23:03.200 --> 0:23:08.119 as a woman. The famous feminist Mary Wolstonecraft, thought of 0:23:08.560 --> 0:23:11.520 as a woman on par with Sappho, and the famous 0:23:11.640 --> 0:23:17.200 letter writer Eloise or Eloisa Dion both defied and defined 0:23:17.720 --> 0:23:22.080 modern conventions of gender. It's a strange fallacy that people 0:23:22.119 --> 0:23:27.240 assume trans people are a new phenomenon. The vocabulary might 0:23:27.280 --> 0:23:31.520 be new, but presentations of gender throughout history are much 0:23:31.560 --> 0:23:35.120 more varied and more nebulous than some people seem desperate 0:23:35.160 --> 0:23:40.639 to keep believing. The Servali Deon became an international celebrity 0:23:40.760 --> 0:23:43.800 presenting as a man, and then she did it again, 0:23:44.400 --> 0:23:56.960 backwards and inhales. That's the story of the Chevalier Dion. 0:23:57.119 --> 0:24:00.520 But continue listening after a brief sponsor break to hear 0:24:00.560 --> 0:24:14.720 a little bit more about her legacy. A portrait of 0:24:14.760 --> 0:24:18.000 the Chevalier d'on now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery 0:24:18.000 --> 0:24:21.560 in London, featuring Dion with a full head of curls 0:24:21.560 --> 0:24:24.200 and a gown and a hat with a tricolor ribbon, 0:24:24.640 --> 0:24:28.720 meant to show her support for the French revolutionaries. The 0:24:28.760 --> 0:24:32.800 announcement about the portraits, purchased back in twenty sixteen, is 0:24:33.520 --> 0:24:38.520 wildly let's say, casual in its language, with the Guardian 0:24:38.680 --> 0:24:42.720 mis gendering her and switching seemingly at random between pronouns. 0:24:43.840 --> 0:24:46.119 At the end of her life, Dion was buried in 0:24:46.160 --> 0:24:49.639 a private plot at Saint Pancras, although her grave was 0:24:49.760 --> 0:24:52.840 lost when the church was constructed into a train station. 0:24:53.840 --> 0:24:57.760 Maybe it's symbolically resonant. Her soul is in a place 0:24:57.880 --> 0:25:01.280 of change and departure, where no one has to stay 0:25:01.359 --> 0:25:11.440 in the same place for too long. Noble Blood is 0:25:11.440 --> 0:25:14.000 a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild 0:25:14.040 --> 0:25:16.959 from Aaron Monkey. The show is written and hosted by 0:25:17.000 --> 0:25:21.720 Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, 0:25:21.800 --> 0:25:25.200 and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at 0:25:25.240 --> 0:25:27.680 Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the 0:25:27.720 --> 0:25:30.680 show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more 0:25:30.720 --> 0:25:33.920 podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, 0:25:34.080 --> 0:25:37.320 Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 0:25:38.720 --> 0:25:38.760 M