“Keep still, buddy. We have to get this off you quickly.”
<You’re acting like it’s nuclear waste.>
“It’s worse than that.”
<It is? Then get it off me!>
“I’m working on it, Oberon.”
<Tell me that story so I can think about something else.>
“All right, we’re heading back in time to seventeenth-century France, at the court of Louis the Fourteenth.”
<Did he ever get mad about his name?>
“What?”
<Did he ever say, “Geez, all the names in the world out there and my family picked Louis fourteen times?”>
“I don’t think he was embarrassed about it. He was the king.”
<Oh. Yeah, I guess that would take the sting out of it.>
The court of a king is littered with pages waiting to do small errands for the nobility. You’re tripping over them quite often, and someone has to train them how to get out of the way and conduct themselves properly. That task fell to the father of our heroine, who trained his daughter with all the pages of the court to fence and take insult and give it right back. Her name was Julie d’Aubigny, and she was married very young to a man named Maupin, who was sent to the south of France for work while she remained in Paris. She was known as Mademoiselle Maupin after that, a famous opera singer, lover, and duelist.
She often dressed as a man but did not disguise her face or do anything else to pretend she was actually male; she sang for her supper in local taverns and participated in fencing exhibitions with a man she traveled with for a while. But when she tired of him, she began a torrid affair with a young woman, and eventually her lover’s family found out and decided to solve what they saw as a problem by sending the young woman to a convent. Mademoiselle Maupin did not give up, however—she was in love. She applied to this convent in Avignon herself, taking her vows and reuniting with the young woman. She immediately began plotting their escape and came up with a simple plan: Set something on fire. What she set on fire was the body of another nun—already dead—in the bed of her young lover, thereby covering their escape. They had another three months of passion together before their own flame flickered out and the girl returned to her family. Mademoiselle Maupin, in the meantime, was charged with arson and body snatching, the penalty for which was to be burned alive. She never faced those charges, though—she got pardoned by Louis XIV later, thanks to her connections at court.
Mademoiselle Maupin hit the road again, singing, taking a series of male lovers, and occasionally kicking someone’s ass in a duel, until she arrived in Paris and joined the opera there. Her life was only mildly tempestuous for a while—she had to beat the hell out of a misogynistic actor once and her landlord on another occasion—but then she landed in serious trouble again when she attended a fancy ball dressed as a man and kissed a young woman there in front of nobility. This was quite offensive according to the social customs of the time, and she was promptly challenged to a duel by three different men. She went outside and beat them all, one after the other; while they bled in the street, she went back inside and kissed the girl again.
Kissing the girl wasn’t the true problem: The problem was that she had very publicly broken the king’s law against dueling within the limits of Paris and had to leave the country for a time. She relocated to Brussels, sang in the opera there, had several more affairs, and then returned to France, where she sang in the Paris Opera until 1705. Her final affair was with a woman who died in an untimely fashion, and she took her lover’s death quite hard and retired from the opera altogether. She entered a convent, in fact, and died a couple of years later at the young age of thirty-three. It was a short, violent, but passionate life she led. She didn’t give a damn about gender roles, and she kissed and fought whomever she felt like kissing or fighting, and she sang beautifully and snatched bodies when she needed to. That was Julie d’Aubigny, or Mademoiselle Maupin.
<Wow, Atticus. She was awesome! Did you ever meet her?>
“I did not meet her personally, but I did see her perform Tancrède at the Paris Opera in 1702.”
<Was she good?>
“Oh, she was very good. And you are very good. We almost have all this gunk off you. How are you feeling?”