Sep 26, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 12 segments
London bet a fortune on whether the Chevalier d'Éon was a man or a woman. She never answered. She just got dressed. Tonight, drift off to the story of Charles-Geneviève d'Éon de Beaumont, born in…
Imagine, if you will, the year seventeen twenty-eight.
It is October, and the vineyards on the hillsides have turned gold and rust.
The air smells of crushed grapes and wood smoke.
At the heart of the town, there is a spring.
The people call it the Fosse d'Eon.
It rises from somewhere deep in the limestone and pools in a round stone basin, and the water is a color you would not believe if you had not seen it.
Blue-green, perfectly clear, and cold enough to ache.
Women kneel at its edge with laundry.
Children lean over to look for the bottom, which no one has ever found.
A few streets away, in a house belonging to a family of minor nobility, a child is born on the fifth of October.
The family is old and proud and not rich.
The child is baptized with a long string of names, seven of them, and among them is Genevieve, a girl's name folded in with the rest.
We will call this child she.
She asked to be called so for the last third of her life, and the last word on a life belongs to the one who lived it.
Everything that follows begins in this small town, and everything that follows will come back to it.
The child grows up quick and small and clever.
Her father is a lawyer and an official of the king, and later the mayor of Tonnerre.
She reads civil law and church law at the Collège Mazarin and finishes at twenty-one.
She writes well.
She fences beautifully.
She has a light frame and a smooth face and a gift for imitation, and people remember her.
In Paris, she is noticed by the Prince de Conti, a cousin of the king, and through him she comes to the attention of Louis XV himself.
Imagine, if you will, the year seventeen twenty-eight.
It is October, and the vineyards on the hillsides have turned gold and rust.
The air smells of crushed grapes and wood smoke.
At the heart of the town, there is a spring.
The people call it the Fosse d'Eon.
It rises from somewhere deep in the limestone and pools in a round stone basin, and the water is a color you would not believe if you had not seen it.
Blue-green, perfectly clear, and cold enough to ache.
Women kneel at its edge with laundry.
Children lean over to look for the bottom, which no one has ever found.
A few streets away, in a house belonging to a family of minor nobility, a child is born on the fifth of October.
The family is old and proud and not rich.
The child is baptized with a long string of names, seven of them, and among them is Genevieve, a girl's name folded in with the rest.
We will call this child she.
She asked to be called so for the last third of her life, and the last word on a life belongs to the one who lived it.
Everything that follows begins in this small town, and everything that follows will come back to it.
The child grows up quick and small and clever.
Her father is a lawyer and an official of the king, and later the mayor of Tonnerre.
She reads civil law and church law at the Collège Mazarin and finishes at twenty-one.
She writes well.
She fences beautifully.
She has a light frame and a smooth face and a gift for imitation, and people remember her.
In Paris, she is noticed by the Prince de Conti, a cousin of the king, and through him she comes to the attention of Louis XV himself.
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