By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  What is not in doubt is the subsequent score: all the newspaper reports indicate that it was a rout, d’Eon triumphing by seven hits to one. It was a memorable victory, yet far from d’Eon’s last appearance on the piste. As new debts accrued, and with his pension stopped by the Revolution, d’Eon was forced to auction off his jewels and the greater part of his library at Christie’s. Now that his obligations had been swept away along with the French crown, he was free to leave off wearing women’s clothes, but he continued with them voluntarily, often finishing off his outfit with the ribbon and cross of his military decorations, though even these had eventually to be put up for sale.

  Throughout these misfortunes d’Eon continued to fence, sometimes dressed in his old dragoon uniform, at others in semifemale costume; in this last garb he took part in a tournament in 1793, presided over by the Prince of Wales, and was again victorious. He decided to join forces with Jacob de Launay, his former servant, and a fencer called Mrs. Bateman, and together they toured the south of England and the Midlands giving demonstrations and inviting challenges. Newspaper reports record d’Eon’s victories at Dover, Canterbury, and Oxford.

  This extraordinary late flowering—d’Eon was nearly seventy—was stopped only by a serious accident. On August 26, 1796, in Southampton, he was fencing against Launay when his opponent’s blade broke and entered his right armpit. The wound, exacerbated by blood poisoning, confined him to bed for four months, in the course of which he bitterly acknowledged that henceforth he would be reduced “to cutting his bread with his sword.”

  As soon as he was well enough, d’Eon moved back to London and set up house with a Mrs. Marie Cole, the French widow of a British naval engineer. They survived on the kindness of friends, with the help of an allowance of £50 a year from Queen Charlotte and the Prince of Wales. This was not enough to save d’Eon from being thrown into debtors’ prison in 1804, at the age of seventy-six. After Mrs. Cole raised the money to secure his release, the two friends moved to 26 Milman Street, where d’Eon died on May 21, 1810, at the age of eighty-one.

  The much-publicized postmortem by the celebrated medical friar Père Elysée settled the question of d’Eon’s sex once and for all: anatomically, he was a man. Mrs. Cole, his companion for the past fourteen years, was, according to reports, deeply shocked. Frédéric Gaillardet, in his artificial Memoirs, provides a colorful chronicle of d’Eon’s passing: “At the news of his death Queen Charlotte tried to ensure that the secret of his sex was buried with him. But the men she sent to guard the body could not restrain the flood of curiosity his death had aroused in high places. In spite of all the measures she had taken to try to prevent it, the corpse was minutely examined by surgeons in the presence of eminent witnesses and subjected to a post-mortem which established beyond doubt that it was that of a man.” Gaillardet goes on to transform this discovery into an affair of state: “When George III, who had been in his right mind for twenty years after recovering from his first bout of insanity, heard the result of the medical examination, he went mad again and remained so till his death in 1820.”23

  So passed one of history’s most extraordinary swordsmen. In the 1920s the sexologist Havelock Ellis made a classic study of d’Eon. Transvestism, he explained, was basic to d’Eon’s nature; he linked d’Eon’s love of dressing as a woman with his lack of interest in heterosexual or indeed homosexual activity. “He clearly had a constitutional predisposition,” Ellis declared, “aided by an almost asexual disposition. In people with this psychic anomaly, physical sexual urge seems often subnormal.”

  D’Eon had a different view of his constitution. In a letter of June 18, 1800, seeking money from Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, then minister of foreign affairs, d’Eon had written, “I have fought the good fight; I am seventy-three years of age; I have a saber cut on my head, a broken leg and two bayonet thrusts. In 1756 I contributed largely to the alliance of France and Russia. In 1762 and 1763 I laboured night and day to establish peace between France and England. I was in direct and secret correspondence with Louis XV from 1756 to the year of his death. My head belongs to the war department. My heart to France.”24

  THE ENGRAVING BY JAMES GILLRAY OF THE D’EON/SAINT-GEORGES match of 1787 shows d’Eon attacking in a full lunge. The spectators—the Prince’s political friends of the time (Charles Fox, Sheridan, and Edmund Burke) and the various fencing celebrities of London and Paris—are ranged behind a barrier; George, Prince of Wales, and Mrs. Fitzherbert (his illegal wife) are easily identifiable. The prince was said to have relished the match, particularly the violent noises made by Saint-Georges during his attacks, which, as one broadsheet put it, “resembled more the roaring of a bull than sounds emanating from a human being.”25

  Who was this Saint-Georges, described at the time as a “Creole, a sort of Admirable Crichton of his day, musician, composer, athlete, horseman and swimmer … this worthy rival of the Chevalier d’Eon, both in swordsmanship, fashionable popularity, and wayward notoriety”?26 He was a mulatto, the son of Georges de Boulogne, a high-ranking official under Louis XVI who owned a plantation in Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies. During one of his visits there, Boulogne fell ill and was nursed back to health by a local woman, “La Belle Nanon.” The two became lovers, and Nanon gave birth to a son. After Boulogne returned to France, he arranged for Nanon and their child to follow him. They traveled on board the Saint-Georges, and when Nanon had her son baptized she named him after the ship.b

  The duel at Carlton House in 1787 between Saint-Georges and the Chevalier d’Eon, as re-created by Gillray. The figure in a hat, standing, is the Prince of Wales; to his left are several other well-known figures of the time. (illustration credit 4.5)

  For six years, Saint-Georges was apprenticed to the great fencing master Texier La Boessière (whose son Antoine, also a master, would write the influential Traité de l’art des armes). It was a Pygmalion type of arrangement: the brilliant black boy, living with a well-to-do white family, given his chance to show that he could master French culture and so rise through the system. He would see his mother only on weekends and was put through the whole rigamarole of knightly “shaping,” one of the last examples before the Revolution.

  Saint-Georges was a quick learner and excelled at a range of accomplishments, particularly as a violinist and fencer. By fifteen he was already a formidable foilist; by sixteen his speed and sense of timing were famous. Nevertheless, another master, teaching in Rouen, described the teenager as “La Boessière’s nigger,” at which his foster father urged him to avenge the slur: before a considerable audience Saint-Georges beat the offender by 27 hits to 3. Shortly thereafter, the tale goes, he met a fellow musician, Agatha Vessières, and the two fell in love. Their secret meetings ended, however, when another musician, besotted with a jealous passion for Saint-Georges, alerted Agatha’s parents. The young man was ordered never to see Agatha again.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, Saint-Georges now embarked on a succession of love affairs, as if to deaden his bitterness. Although exceptionally handsome, he never thought highly of himself, convinced that women fell for him as “an exotic bird or a curiosity from the islands.”28 He continued his fencing and would become the best swordsman in France. “Racine wrote Phèdre,” La Boessière boasted, “but I am the one who made Saint-Georges.” Angelo wrote in his Reminiscences that “he surpassed all his contemporaries and predecessors. No professor or amateur ever showed so much accuracy or so much strength, such length of lunge and such quickness; his attacks were a perpetual series of hits; his parade [parries] were so closed that it was in vain to attempt to touch him—in short, he was all nerve.”29 Saint-Georges was also one of the best shots of his time; one of his feats was to throw up two crown pieces into the air and hit them both before they struck the ground.

  When M. de Boulogne died, he left annual pensions of 8,000 livres each to Saint-Georges and his mother (about $36,000 a year today). Meanwhile, Saint-Georges’s musical career was blossoming: by now a violin v
irtuoso, he was also conductor and composer, with sonatas, comic operas, and string quartets to his name. Marie-Antoinette invited him to the Petit Trianon so she could play the harpsichord for him. He also continued to be “such a favorite among the ladies that his dark complexion and woolly head were forgotten.”30 However, not all was quite so idyllic—he was also the object of racist attacks and on one occasion was set upon by thugs whom a police officer, in an act of private vindictiveness, had paid to club him to death. In 1776 he was considered for the position of manager of the Paris Opera, but the leading singers and actresses begged the queen to veto him, indignant at the thought of being given orders by a mulatto.

  Saint-Georges fought many duels, all successfully, although he was generally the offended party. Once, at Dunkirk, a young officer of hussars was boasting of his skill as a swordsman before several ladies. “Did you ever meet the famous Saint-Georges?” asked one. “Often,” vaunted the hussar. “He could hardly land a hit on me.” At this the real Saint-Georges asked if he might foil with the gentleman, to amuse the company. The officer contemptuously agreed and, of course, was quickly shamed.

  During the Revolution, Saint-Georges, appointed colonel, commanded a battalion composed exclusively of colored men, which became known as “La Légion Saint-Georges”; the father of Alexandre Dumas was one of his officers. In 1793, in the manner of the time, Saint-Georges was unjustly accused of corruption and endured eighteen months of house arrest under sentence of death. He spent his last years a destitute invalid, dying in 1799 aged fifty-four.31

  FRENCH FENCING WAS NOT ALL SMALLSWORD AND ÉPÉE. THE EIGHTEENTH century saw the introduction of the saber, a heavy, curved weapon descended from the Turkish scimitar. In a skirmish it was handier than the basket-hilted broadsword of the heavy cavalry and, being curved, automatically gave a slicing cut. It became the national weapon of Hungary and was immediately so effective that other armies, including the French, took it up; another variation, the cutlass, became the standard naval weapon. By the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), the smallsword developed into a heavier instrument, as the lighter weapon was judged ineffectual for battle. With the development of the bayonet, infantry officers needed a more robust weapon and so adapted the cavalry saber. As First Consul, Napoleon habitually carried a Mameluke scimitar, brought from Egypt.

  Then came 1789, the “hour of universal ferment.” “The French Revolution was, after all, a great demolition,” Simon Schama reminds us.32 The Academy of Fence, so confidently created in 1567, vanished overnight, and its last president, Augustin Rousseau, private fencing master to the king, was unceremoniously guillotined not long after his sovereign, in 1793. The new revolutionaries believed that, having abolished the ancien régime, the duel, one of the privileges and abuses of the aristocracy, would go with it (which may explain why there is no mention of duels in the legislation of the National Assembly). When the revolutionary leader Camille Desmoulins was challenged to a duel, he shrugged and said that he would prove his courage on other fields than the Bois de Boulogne. Certainly during those dangerous times duels were to be avoided: should one challenge the wrong person, one might be denounced as a conspirator or an assassin.

  Early in the Revolution one Citizen Boyer announced that he personally would confront any right-wing member of the National Assembly attempting to force a duel on a representative of the people. Concerned to meet the aristocratic challenges that might flood in, he formed a special force of revolutionary swordsmen, the Spadassinicides, to combat the threat, but their creation was an anticlimax. Although never more than fifty strong, they were enough to frighten off any of Boyer’s anticipated adversaries, and never had to take the field.

  The fashion of wearing swords in private life disappeared during the revolution, yet there are still numerous references to dueling, both between individual members of the Paris garrison and between civilians. Swords and sabers circulated in large numbers, which was the result, first, of the creation of the National Guard, then of its disbanding.33 In September 1792 the Legislative Assembly decreed that all cases pending against duelists since the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 were waived. Since a number of the accused were members of the Assembly, this was hardly surprising, but it meant that the only law against dueling was submerged in the general statutes against murder and assault.

  Out-of-work masters started to give lessons to the new ruling elite, who took up fencing on a regular basis. People who had never thought of having a fencing master now found them highly accessible—if only for economic reasons. Aristocrats’ armories were looted, and citizens paraded with priceless smallswords. Not that they knew how to use them; when push came to thrust, they preferred to use heavily curved broad-bladed sabers. In the revolutionary armies the rule was that the more important the officer (at least, in his own estimation), the larger his sword. In Eugène Delacroix’s famous “Liberty Leading the People” (1831), the figure of Liberty brandishes a musket with bayonet, and one of her three companions holds a broadsword: the intricate conversation of French foilplay had been interrupted, but when the shouting died away there remained plenty of enthusiasm for the sword.

  In 1799 a coup d’état brought to power one of France’s most calculating swordsmen, General Napoleon Bonaparte. He had fenced as a schoolboy, and although as a fifteen-year-old his fencing and dancing (exercises d’agrément) had been marked “very poor,” once he reached military school he took to swordplay with gusto and was noted for the number of foils he broke.34 Bonaparte spent the summer of 1788 at the University of Strasbourg, where the old fencing master would later recall fondly the lessons he had given the young Corsican. By the time Bonaparte seized power there was still no specific law banning dueling, and far from dying out the practice was once more in full flower. (Indeed, one of his foremost officers, Maréchal Ney, was addicted to dueling and once challenged every man in a theater.) Courts tended to act only when a fatality resulted from a breach of established etiquette. Napoleon, however, was firmly against the practice and knew that too many good officers were dying or being disabled by the pastime; a good duelist made a bad soldier. In 1788, when one of Louis XVI’s leading admirals, Pierre-André Suffren de Saint-Tropez, was killed in a duel, the King ordered the official cause of death to be given as apoplexy; several years later, when the King of Sweden issued Napoleon personally with a direct challenge, he replied that he would send a fencing master to wait on the King; he had no intention of making an appearance himself.c

  Yet Napoleon had good reason to be grateful to the sword. While still a junior officer commanding a local militia, he was visited by a teenager whose father had recently been unjustly executed. The boy had come to collect his father’s sword, if M. le Capitaine would allow it. Napoleon received the boy graciously and handed over the heirloom. The next day the boy’s mother paid him a visit, to thank him for his courtesy. This was Joséphine, and the spark was struck.

  It is said that it was Joséphine who brought to Napoleon’s attention the most notable hero in his armies. “Jean-Louis,” as he was known throughout his career, had begun life a small, feeble-looking mulatto on the island of what is now Haiti, relatively close to Joséphine’s birthplace, Martinique. He is heard of first in 1796, the fifth year of the first French Republic, when he arrived in France and was admitted as “un pupille de régiment”—a child in a regiment’s care, usually a war orphan—“though at first objected to on account of his brown complexion and fragile physical appearance.”35 He was taken in hand by the regiment’s fencing master, M. d’Erape, a Flemish nobleman, who was soon predicting a brilliant career for him.

  Jean-Louis had a rapid, simple style, and often won bouts on parry ripostes alone. He “omitted everything that was superfluous,” it was said; “the affected salutes, the contre-coups, the capricious pauses, all shocked him, and appeared to him unworthy of such a serious art.”36 It was possibly at this time that he taught Mme. Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie—Napoleon’s José
phine.

  Two stories in particular are told of him. The first dates from 1804, when, having established a reputation as a fencer, he was insulted by a local braggart in his garrison town, who mocked him, saying “The sword wasn’t invented to be used by a mulatto.” Otherwise a man of even temper, Jean-Louis eventually accepted the duel his adversary had been hoping for but stipulated that whereas his opponent would have a normal sword he would fight with a buttoned foil. When friends called him mad, he replied, “I am so little crazy that tomorrow I shall administer Monsieur the punishment he deserves.” Which of course he did, parrying all the bully’s attacks before slashing him across the face so hard that he knocked the man over and left him bleeding.

  The second adventure occurred around 1812, after Jean-Louis had seen action in Egypt, Italy, Prussia, and Russia. He was in Madrid with the 32nd Regiment of the army’s Third Division. It had been a policy of Napoleon that whenever he conquered a country he would integrate men from the defeated nation into the French forces, so there were a number of Italians in his army. The campaign in Spain had been a disastrous failure, but many Italians remained stationed there, particularly in the 1st Regiment. A skirmish broke out with the 32nd Regiment, and the men started to fight each other—at bayonet point. Soon there were scores of dead and wounded. To avoid a complete slaughter, officers from both sides hurriedly convened to work out a solution. It was decided, imaginatively, that fifteen fencing masters and provosts from each of the two regiments would square off in succession until one side no longer had a man standing.