By Octave Homberg, Fernand Jousselin, Alfred Rieu (trans.), Year Unknown
After the death of the Chevalier d’Eon in London in extreme poverty in the year 1810, a mass of his unpublished papers and letters, which he had carefully preserved all his life, fell into the hands of one of his creditors, and lay neglected for nearly a hundred years in an English bookseller’s shop. There it was that the authors of this book were fortunate enough to discover them by chance at a sale.These private documents, in addition to the state papers in the archives of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the municipal records of his native town of Tonnerre, enable his biographers to follow the career of the Chevalier with particularity, and to set at rest what was for so long a vexed question, the mystery of his sex.
