Born in France in 1673, Julie d’Aubigny — better known as La Maupin — would grow up to become an accomplished opera singer and swordsman, and her sexual exploits made her what may well have been the first bisexual celebrity in history. Her father trained the court pages, so she learned many of the skills, including fencing, that pages needed to know early in her life.
At the age of fourteen, she became the mistress to her dad’s boss. But he soon found her to be a little too much to handle, and she was married off to a mild-mannered man named Sieur de Maupin. Shortly after the wedding, he was given an administrative position in the southern part of France. Julie opted to remain in Paris.
Circa 1687, she became involved with a fencing instructor who — shortly thereafter — became a fugitive after murdering someone. Julie, apparently, decided that this was actually the absolute best time to stand by her man (even though this wasn’t actually her man because, y’know, married) and became a fugitive alongside him. She donned men’s clothing, but otherwise made no real attempts to hide her gender, and the duo made a living by singing in taverns and giving fencing exhibitions.
The duo reached Marseilles, and Julie joined an opera company — singing under her maiden name. It was about this time that she decided she was over the fencing instructor, and she began a relationship with a young woman. The woman’s parents put her in a convent in Avignon. This wasn’t enough to deter La Maupin, she entered the convent as a postulant and set about securing their escape. To that end, she put the corpse of a dead nun in her lover’s bed and set the room on fire. This proved enough of a distraction to allow them to escape.
The affair lasted three more months, but eventually the young woman returned to her family. Julie was charged, as a male (and in absentia because no one managed to catch her), with kidnapping, body snatching, arson, and failure to appear before a tribunal and was sentenced to death by fire. She took off once more, making her way back to Paris and earning a living by singing.
In Villerperdue, Julie engaged in a duel with a nobleman she would later learn was the son of the Duke of Luynes. After wounding him in the duel, she visited him and they briefly became lovers. This relationship ended when he had healed and returned to his military unit, though the two remained friends for the rest of Julie’s life. (I mention this because most of Julie’s relationships don’t end that well.)
Julie soon met another singer, named Gabriel-Vincent Thevenard. They began a relationship while they both traveled towards Paris, hoping to join the Paris Opera. While on the way, Julie contacted her father’s employer/her former lover and asked him to convince the king to pardon her for her convent-related crimes. And she was, in fact, pardoned.
Initially, Julie was denied a place with the Paris Opera, but Thevenard intervened on her behalf. She began performing regularly in the opera, initially as a soprano and then later in the contralto range. Her performances were very popular, and the Marquis de Dangeau even wrote that she had the “most beautiful voice in the world”.
But Julie also caused a stir by having outlandish episodes and habitually wearing men’s clothes — although she still never tried to pass herself off as a man. Nevertheless, some refused to believe she was a woman — one anecdote tells of a heckler who accused her of being a man in the middle of one of her performances. She responded by ripping off her shirt. La Maupin, as she was known by now, was capturing the imaginations of all of Paris.
Another famous anecdote from this period of her life — one singer in the opera was harassing the women of the troupe, so La Maupin challenged him to a duel. He refused, so instead she beat him with a cane and stole his wallet and snuffbox. The next day, she overheard him complaining that he’d been jumped by a group of men — so she threw his watch and snuffbox at him and announced that she was the only one involved in kicking his sorry chauvinistic ass.
She fell in love with another female singer of the troupe, Fanchon Moreau, who actually rejected her. This left La Maupin pretty distraught, and by some accounts she tried to commit suicide, but apparently she got over it quickly. In 1695, La Maupin kissed a woman at a royal ball, and was immediately challenged to duels by three men. She bested all of them — but laws existed against dueling within the city of Paris. By some accounts she was pardoned immediately by the king, because he thought this was entertaining and the anti-dueling laws technically only applied to men. Whether or not this happened, she left Paris for Brussels pretty immediately.
She began a relationship with the Elector of Bavaria, and performed in the opera in Brussels from 1697 to 1698 — at which point, she returned to Paris to replace a retiring performer at the Paris Opera. She continued performing there until 1705. In these final years, she had a romantic relationship with Madame la Marquise de Florensac. When Florensac died, La Maupin was inconsolable.
After 1705, accounts differ. By some accounts, she returned to her husband — because, right, they were still married. That whole time. By other accounts, she entered a convent and became a nun. Both of these accounts come out sounding more like morality tales about how not to spend your life as a heathenous, cross-dressing, bisexual celebrity so I’d take both of them with a grain of salt. She is believed to have died in 1707, at the age of 33. (Yeah, she fit all of that in between the ages of 14 and 33!)
La Maupin’s gender identity is a bit of a question, that unfortunately we’ll probably never have confirmation of, but with her frequent waffles back and forth between men and women in her romantic relationships, it’s pretty hard for even the most conservative of historians to try to paint her as a straight woman. This is pretty remarkable in its own right because a lot of historians are very good at straight-washing people.
(Adapted from this Facebook post.)
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