Thursday, March 03, 2005

The File: Gentlemen's Blood

Some stalwarts saw all the lighter weapons as decadent and a sad comedown from knightlier days. Even a lady could lift them. La Maupin, for instance. She was by no means a lady, being a principal singer at the Opéra, but she was a woman, and one of her lovers had been a famous fencing master who gave her lessons. She was so hot-tempered and so skillful with the blade that some people didn't believe she was a woman at all.

One evening at a ball, she insulted a lady, and the lady's gentlemen friends demanded that she leave the room. She said she would, but only if the indignant gentlemen would come outside and fight. They did and, according to the generally accepted story, she killed them all, fair and square, and then smoothed down her dress and went back to the ball....

In an earlier and possibly more likely account, we learn that she was tall, athletic, and strikingly beautiful, with white skin, blue eyes, and auburn hair as well as a lovely contralto voice. She often dressed as a man and enjoyed the attentions of women as well as men. By this version, she didn't insult the lady at the ball; on the contrary, dressed as a dashing cavalier, she was dancing and flirting with her, and kissed her in the middle of the dance floor. Three of the lady's suitors objected, and she replied, "At your service, gentlemen," the standard offer of an instant duel. All four of them went out into the dark gardens to fight it out, and only La Maupin returned. As to whether the three gentlemen were dead or only bleeding, nobody says....

In any case, Louis XIV pardoned her, and she went off to Brussels to become mistress of the elector of Bavaria.
-- Barbara Holland, Gentlemen's Blood: A History of Dueling from Swords at Dawn to Pistols at Dusk

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