Studies in the psychology of sex. Vol. VII, Eonism and other supplementary studies / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
[1928]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Studies in the psychology of sex. Vol. VII, Eonism and other supplementary studies / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    theory will hardly work out. A man who “plays a part” during the greater part of his active life and continues to play it long after the active phase of his life is over, plays it, moreover, with such ability and success that no one suspects the “mas¬ querade,” is, we may be sure, fulfilling a deep demand of his own nature. He clearly had a constitutional predisposition for the life he adopted, aided by an almost asexual disposition, so that we might place him with the asexual group of transvests in Hirschfeld’s classification. It is to be noted, however, that in people with this psychic anomaly physical sexual vigor seems often subnormal. There are many books on the Chevalier d’Eon both in French and English. Most of them are imperfectly reliable and by authors who were without psychological equipment. Reference may be made to Gaillardet, Memoires de la Chevaliere d’Eon, 1866 (but not the romancing book written by the same author thirty years before and afterwards frankly withdrawn by him) ; J. B. Telfer, The Strange Career of the Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont, 1885; E. A. Vizetelly, The True Story of the Chevalier d’Eon, 1895 (a little book by J. B. Telfer, Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont: A Treatise, 1896, is mainly a correction of inaccuracies in Vizetelly’s work) ; G. Letainturier-Fradin, La Cheva¬ liere d’Eon, 1901; O. Homberg and F. Jousselin, Un Aventurier au XVIII& Siecle, 1904, translated into English as D’Eon de Beaumont: His Life and Times, in 1911. A German writer, Adolf Paul, has used the Chevalier’s story, with much freedom, as the subject of a novel, Excellenz Unterrock (1916). While the Chevalier d’Eon, by his abilities and his public prominence, stands out as the protagonist of transvestism, he is not its earliest representative of note. His fellow-country¬ man the Abbe de Choisy (Franqois Timoleon de Choisy) takes precedence not only in time but by virtue of the record he has himself left of his adventures in woman’s garb. Like the Chevalier d’Eon, he was of good birth and high ability, though he never attained the same conspicuous international reputa¬ tion. But he mixed in the best aristocratic and intellectual circles of eighteenth century France, and notwithstanding the feminine disguises of his early life he became a distinguished / i
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