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Julie D'Aubigny

Other Names: La Maupin (as married women were called by their last names) or Mademoiselle Maupin (as performers were called Mademoiselle)
Lifetime: 1673 (or 1670) to 1707.
Historical Context: 17th century France, which... was exactly what it sounds like, as far as I can tell.

Life


Julie d'Aubigny was born to Gustav d'Aubigny, who worked with Louis de Lorraine-Guise, the Master of Horses to King Louis XIV's horses. (Wow, info dump. Bear with me here, there are a lot of names but I promise it matters.) Julie grew up treated as a page, which is very important in understanding her. She was wearing boys' clothing and learning to fence, draw, dance, and read from a very young age. Because hello, 17th century France, she was taken on by Lorraine-Guise as a mistress at age 14. Lorraine-Guise then married her to another man, Sieur de Maupin of Saint-Germaine-en-Laye. It's a mouthful of a name, but it's important—the name, not the man—because it made Julie "La Maupin", as is French custom, which is the name she's best known by. Shortly after her wedding her husband went off to southern France for work, but Julie stayed in Paris. This is where it gets wild.

To quote Wikipedia, Julie "gets involved" with an assistant fencing master, Sérannes something-or-other. Sérannes is accused of killing someone in a duel (duels being illegal), so the couple flees to Marseilles. They earn a living on the road by doing fencing performances; Julie wears mens' clothes, but does not conceal her gender. Resulting bonus story: there's one tale of her where someone refused to believe she was a girl because she was such a good fencer. She promptly took off her shirt.

Moving on: in Marseilles, Julie joined the opera because she could sing, and damn well apparently. And you know what happened? She got bored of Sérennes, left him, and fell in love with a local merchant's daughter. The girl's name is lost to time, much to my distress. When her lover was sent to a convent by her parents, who wanted to separate the two, Julie followed her by posing as a postulant. (They almost definitely had sex in that convent, which I find hilarious.) Not long after, an old nun died of unrelated causes, so what did Julie do? Like any right-minded person, she stole the body, put it in her beloved's room, and set the convent on fire. The affair continued for 3 months, during which time the girl was assumed dead, before the girl returned to her parents. Julie was charged—as a man, because France didn't think a woman could have done what she did— with "kidnapping, body snatching, arson, and failing to appear [in court]" (Wikipedia); the sentence was death by fire. Ironic.

Technically a wanted woman, Julie left Marseilles for Paris and became a singer on the road. On the way, she seduced and sword-fought her way through life for a while: see here for some specific hilarious stories I can't fit on this page (essentially she fought a heck ton of people and won everything.) Notably, one man—Count d'Albert— insulted her, so she dueled him and stabbed him in the shoulder. Later a friend approached her to apologize on his behalf, and feeling bad, she went to visit him in the hospital. She became both his lover and his lifelong friend.

Later she had another affair with a fellow singer. Together they went back to Paris in hopes of joining the Paris Opera. Julie got help from Lorraine-Guise, the horse master who married her off, in nulling the charges against her. In 1690 she joined the Opera and debuted that very year. She became famous for both her appearance and her lovely voice. She kept beating people up, and fell in love with a woman named Fanchon Moreau. When rejected, she tried and failed to commit suicide.

Again according to Wikipedia, "Her Paris career was interrupted around 1695, when she kissed a young woman at a society ball and was challenged to duels by three different noblemen". She beat them all, but once again had to flee because duels were still illegal. She went to Brussels, where she became the mistress of the Elector of Bavaria (note that I'm still not clear on what that position actually means). It's not a well supported story, but some sources say that she was so much drama that the Elector tried to bribe her to leave.

When she came back to the Opera years later to replace someone retiring, she sang in Versailles and other cool places. She and d'Albret got in more trouble over the years, but she was never again forced to leave Paris.

The end of her life is summed up nicely by Wikipedia. "These final years of her career were spent in a relationship with the Madame la Marquise de Florensac, upon whose death La Maupin was inconsolable. She retired from the opera in 1705 and took refuge in a convent, probably in Provence, where she died in 1707 at the age of 33. She has no known grave." If I knew where she was buried, I would travel there myself and pay my respects.

Appearances in Fiction


To quote Wikipedia:

"Théophile Gautier, when asked to write a story about d'Aubigny, instead produced the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, published in 1835, taking aspects of the real La Maupin as a starting point, and naming some of the characters after her and her acquaintances… D'Albert and his mistress Rosette are both in love with the androgynous Théodore de Sérannes, whom neither of them knows is really Madeleine de Maupin."

Wikipedia lists several other works referencing her as well, including a 2017 musical.

Sources