This story is dedicated to Comtesse Baharat Atlas, for the Opera section, and to Sophie Dalville, for the fencing section.

CHAPTER ONE :

It all begins under the reign of Louis XIV, in 17 ^th Century.

Louis de Lorraine- Harcourt, Comte dArmagnac, Comte de Charny, Comte de Brionne, Vicomte de Marsan, Chevalier of the Kings Order, Senechal of Burgundy, Governor of Anjou, is Grand Squire of France, Master of the Horse and Crown Equerry. He is one of the kingdoms four Grand Officers, and Louis XIV calls him Cousin, a privilege in itself!

Being in charge of the Royal Stables and horse breeding, his duties include, among many others, the education of young Nobles to become the Kings Pages.

Monsieur Gaston dAubigny (not a Noble), is the Comte dArmagnacs secretary, and the director of this Pages school, where they are taught manners of the Court, but mainly horse riding and fencing. Gaston dAubigny, a heavy drinker and addicted skirt chaser, has one daughter, Julie. She receives the same education as the Pages, quite unusual for a girl.

At age 15, she is by far the best fencer of them all and rides horses like a man. She has become a woman too, and her budding beauty, as well as her unusual skills and flamboyant personality, catch the eyes of the Comte dArmagnac. She becomes his mistress.

In order to hide this liaison behind a respectable faade, le Comte dArmagnac arranges the marriage of Julie with a certain Monsieur Maupin, an obscure civil servant, whom, by a strange occurrence (ahem...) is immediately summoned to service in a very distant part of the kingdom. Of course, Julie does not follow her husband, and stays with the Comte. He introduces her to Versailles, where she attends, at respectable distance according to her special status, to some ceremonies, and is invited to minor Salons.

In retrospect, we can guess she must have been in awe of the Courts splendour, and at the same time doubt that her fiery and free-wheeling temper could have been satisfied by such a strictly coded environment.

Eventually, the inevitable happens: le Comte and La Maupin become jaded, and estranged.

She stays in Paris, and being alone but married allows her more freedom than unmarried girls of her age. She lives a bohemian life between cabarets and salles darmes ( fencing arms rooms), where she challenges fencing amateurs and professionals, more than often winning. She turns wild sometimes, and is reported to have struck some shopkeepers, and quarrelled violently with young aristocrats in the streets. One day, in a salle darmes, she meets a professional fencer, a Beau named Srannes, and they fall in love.

Sharing their passion for each other and for fencing, they live at random like carefree youngsters for some time, until Srannes gets entangled in a bad case of a forbidden duel that caused someones death, under the porch of the Carmelites church.

The Paris Lieutenant- General of Police, the famous and most dreaded La Reynie, is determined to chase and find Srannes; the sentence for such an offence can be death or the galleys! The young couple, frightened, decides to flee Paris to Srannesbirth place, Marseilles, where he says he has friends and opportunities.

Arriving there, of course, friends turn their back on them, and opportunities fail to occur.

La Maupin has a grand idea: why not create a new cabaret act? She will dress as a man, and fence with Srannes, and during or between fights, they will act and sing songs! and this, they do...

Its an immediate success! People are stunned , not only by this novelty show, but also by this splendid and charismatic woman dressed as a man ,fencing like a champion, and singing beautifully like a girl...A mixed, ambiguous and disturbing feeling, between desire and scandal...Julie discovers that she enjoys causing such trouble and confusion in the minds and senses of men and women in the audience. When acting, she feels waves of fascination and hidden desire vibrating from the crowd unto her, and she enjoys so much being wrapped in them. From now on, she will sometimes wear mens clothes, in everyday life too, even walking in the streets in manly attire.

One day, someone in the audience suggests that she should attend the singing class at the Opera Academy of Marseilles. She is promptly auditioned by the Director, Pierre Gaultier, a friend of Lully, the great music composer.. She has no vocal technique yet, but an immense musical memory, an incredible stage presence and a dream voice of Bas-Dessus (as the mezzo-soprano voices were called in those days; some argue that La Maupins voice was rather a contralto voice, but alas! well never know. ) Gaultier falls under her spell. She enters the Academy of Music, and as she improves quickly, and learns the Repertoire at lightning speed, she is soon afterwards hired in the Opera House of Marseilles, under the stage name of Julie dAubigny, and begins her Opera Career.

( to be continued)

( pictures, from top to bottom: (1)a portrait of Mademoiselle de Maupin, probably by the end of her life

(2) Louis de Lorraine-Harcourt, Comte d'Armagnac, as a young man

(3) a "fancy" portrait of La Maupin in a fencing outfit, drawn by Aubrey Beardsley by the end of the 19th century.