Note 41 — XI THE CHEVALIER D'ÉON

The most recent work on d'Éon, Le Chevalier d'Éon, 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'Éon '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'Éon 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'Éon (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'Éon 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 documents, 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.