Lovers and La Maupin

A bisexual, sword-fighting, opera-singing, 17th century arsonist... no wonder there are so many stories about her. [Side note: I wrote a book! It's a gothic love story about 19th century Edinburgh, and you can pre-order here: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/anatomy-a-love-story/]

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minkie. Listener discretion is advised.
The woman was fencing in a tavern, brandishing her sword

(00:21):
in wide circles and curly cues with a showman's air
for performance. She shouted and leaped on to a bench.
Her opponent did the same. The pair of them clinked
swords as they half thought half danced up on to
the long table. It helped her agility that the woman
was wearing men's clothing, boots and pants. The woman smiled

(00:45):
and winked at the patrons lifting their mugs of ale
at her, even as she defended herself from Perry's and jabs.
Her name was Julie Daubney, and soon she would be
a legend. The sword fight was really a sword fight.
It was a performance, a fencing demonstration between Julie and

(01:06):
her lover, a swordsman named Seran. He had trained her
for months while they toured together from town to town,
tavern to tavern around France, and now people said that
her skills surpassed even his. When the fighting portion of
the entertainment was over, Julie remained standing on the table
at the tavern and began to sing in a beautiful,

(01:29):
clear contralto voice that she could make thick with emotion
on que. Soon the drunken tavern patrons were joining in
on the choruses, stomping their feet and slapping their thighs
in time to the beat. When the song quieted down,
one drunken reveler teetered, spilling his drink from the sides

(01:51):
of his cup. She's not even a real lady, he shouted.
No woman dresses or fences like that. It's a man.
Julie d'aubney smiled without a word. She removed her jacket,
unbuttoned her blouse, and showed the heckler and half of
the pub her naked breasts. That story about Julie Daubney,

(02:14):
the woman who would go on to enchant Paris as
the unfontrebla of the opera world, is apocryphal, as are
so many of the stories about her life. Julie Dabney was,
even in her lifetime, a figure larger than life, who
scandalized and quickly became sensationalized. Her biography seems ripped from

(02:36):
a romance novel. It's only fitting that it's been fictionalized
dozens of times in different iterations. She is the archetype,
at least in my mind, for a number of female
characters in period pieces. That girl who fences and seduces,
who runs away and gets into trouble, only to seduce

(02:57):
her way out of trouble. Jule was a nobleman's mistress, offenser,
a nun, and an opera singer all before she was twenty.
Because so much of her life has been borrowed or fabricated,
either to fit the mold of an adventure story or
a cautionary tale, it's almost impossible to tease out what

(03:19):
actually happened in real life. All we have are the stories.
And so I'll tell you the story of the woman
who became known as Lamupin and leave you with the
terrible burden of knowing that some of it might be
too outlandish to be true. But then again it might
not be. If Julie Daubney can teach us anything, it's

(03:41):
that people who live and love without landish passion can
sometimes lead extraordinary lives. I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is
noble blood. We don't know for sure when Julie Dubny

(04:05):
was born, but we can guess that it was around
sixteen seventy three. She was the only child to a
man named Gaston, who worked as the secretary to the
Compte Armagnac. The Comte de Armagnac was King Louis, the
fourteenth Master of the Horse, and so as the daughter
of his secretary, Julie spent much of her childhood at

(04:25):
the riding school at the Tuileries in Paris, before she
eventually moved with the court to Versailles, where she lived
in the Great Stables. Maybe because her father had had
no sons and Julie was his only child, but for
whatever reason, Julie received a courtly education, both in manners
and in sword fighting. Her father, Gaston, was an accomplished swordsman,

(04:49):
and one of his duties at Versailles was training the
page boys in the basics. Julie learned alongside them, becoming
adept and then astonished shingly good, all before puberty. At
some point in her adolescence, her father died, and it
was also around that time that her father's boss, the

(05:10):
Compe d'Armagnac, took Julie as his mistress. Julie was around
fourteen or fifteen. At that time, she was a child
and the comfort was an adult man, and so even
in the seventeenth century, I think it's worth noting the
power dynamics that would have been at play there. A
sexual relationship with the count was one of Julie's few

(05:31):
ways of gaining any leverage whatsoever over her future, and
the compt was the one who made the decision that
with her father dead, Julie would need an arranged marriage,
and so he married her off to a tax collector
named MupA, who then conveniently was sent out of town.
But Julie wouldn't stick around town much longer either. She

(05:52):
ran away with a fencing master named Saran, who became
her next lover. Depending on the stories, Sharan murdered a
man in a duel, and since duels were illegal, he
had to flee town. Julie came with him, and so
the pair of them toured through France, performing at fencing
demonstrations in taverns and at local fairs. But Julie grew

(06:16):
tired of her lover and their profession equally quickly, and
when the pair reached the south of France, she abandoned
shurran and began to sing in the opera at Marseilles.
It was there, as a teenage opera singer that she
drew the attention of a local merchant's daughter who happened
to be in the audience one night. This is the

(06:37):
story from Julie's life that I find the most outlandish,
but it's also one of the stories with the most evidence.
The pieces are there, and so it's up to us
as historians to piece them together into a way that
makes some semblance of sense. Again, this is a story
stranger than fiction in almost every ingle sense that merchant's

(07:02):
daughter watched Julie on stage, and Julie on stage saw
the girl in the audience gazing up at her. The
two began an affair that became an open secret and
that scandalized the local community, and the merchant, in a
fit of fury and misplaced fatherly protectiveness, banished his daughter

(07:24):
to a convent. But Julie was in love, and convent
walls couldn't keep her away from her lover. Julie herself
entered the convent, pretending to be interested in becoming a nun.
As if any career path could have been further from
the life that she had lived up until that point.
Julie and the merchant's daughter began thinking of ways that

(07:47):
they could run away together, elaborate schemes that would buy
them the freedom that they wanted. Conveniently enough for them,
one of the elderly nuns in the convent happened to
die from unrelated causes. Seeing an opportunity, Julie allegedly dug

(08:07):
up the body, put it into her lover's bedroom, and
then tipped a candle over to start a fire. The
idea was that people would see the dead body burnt
beyond recognition and assume that the merchant's daughter had died.
Then the merchant's daughter and Julie would be free to
start a new life. But the candle did it work

(08:30):
too well. Soon the entire convent was up in flames,
and though their plot was quickly discovered, Julie and the
merchant's daughter were able to escape. In the chaos, Julie
was sentenced by the Parliament in Provence in absentia for arson,
for body snatching, and for kidnapping. Julie's sentence was death.

(08:54):
Peculiarly enough, the sentence was for as Sieur de Maupin
as if Julie were a man. It seems that the
court wanted to spare the merchant's family from the final
public humiliation of their daughter having run away with another woman.
The merchant's daughter would have her own humiliation soon enough.

(09:17):
When Julie tired of her new lover, she deposited her
back at her parents house. Julie was still on the
run and once again alone, but loneliness never stuck to
Julie Daubney. Her next partner wouldn't be romantic, but instead
one of the most defining friendships of her life. While
near Poitier, she encountered an old actor who had once

(09:41):
been a celebrated singing teacher. His name was Machrichel, and
though his alcoholism left him teetering on the edge of ruin,
Julie stayed with him for a while and learned from him.
It was his encouragement that ultimately spurred Julie into auditioning
for the prestigious RS Opera. Julie auditioned and didn't get in.

(10:05):
She auditioned again, rejected again, but she would make another
friend a lover, this time a rising star who had
just been accepted by the Paris Opera himself. His name
was Gabriel Visontevna, and he whispered to the people in
power that they should give Julie another chance. They did,

(10:26):
and this time her audition impressed them. The Parisian Opera
even helped convince the King to pardon Julie for her
youthful arson in discretions, and the king obliged, and so
Julie Daubney joined the opera. As a willful woman, prone
to picking fights and to dressing in men's clothing, she

(10:49):
was never going to be a fit for the operatic
roles of an ingenue soprano. Roles were instead written for
her as a contralto roles of powerful women, goddesses and enchantresses.
Though Julie was married, all oppera singers married or not
performed as Mademoiselle, and so Julie began her tenure on

(11:12):
stage as Mademoiselle de Maupin, or, as she would become famous,
lampin From Here. Julie Daubney's life rolls through wild sounding stories,
as if in montage. In her lifetime, she became famous
as an opera singer, but less for her voice and

(11:32):
more for her escapades off the stage. It's the same
situation you might imagine befalling an actor today who's maybe
not quite as talented as some other performers, but who
still always manages to appear on the front page of tabloids.
These stories come from wildly disparate sources, and very few

(11:53):
of them have the type of specific details that might
make me more confident in them as fact, or at
least confident in where they occurred in Julie's biography. And
to make matters even more complicated, after Julie's death, the
French writer at thefol Gautier wrote a novel called Mademoiselle
de Maupin, which was only loosely based on the real

(12:14):
life of its namesake character, but which plenty of readers
mistook and continued to mistake for a fact. One of
those stories begins with Julie in her favorite place in
the world, performing for a crowd. She was at a
tavern an after party, and the crowd was growing slightly
rowdier than normal. One man named Albert was emboldened by

(12:39):
the atmosphere and by the several drinks he had already imbibed.
And now for my next song, Lamou pomp heard. Delbert
shouted back, I've listened to your chirping, but now tell
me of your plumage. It was a seventeenth century come on.
Julie's sword was drawn before the dunken smile even fell

(13:01):
from Delbert's face. The man tried briefly to defend himself
against her swift sword work, but it was a useless attempt.
Julie parried and ran her sword clean through his shoulder. Later,
Julie felt guilty. He had been drunk and he had
been flirting. Did he really deserve a blade all the

(13:23):
way through and coming out the other side of his body?
So she visited him in the hospital, and depending on
the story you believe, she and the man Delbert, either
became longtime lovers or friends. Some fictionalized versions of Julie's
life even framed Albert as her primary love interest, a

(13:44):
lover who spanned the rest of her life. But I
have to assume that that's maybe based more on the
power of the meat cute, unless on actual source evidence
of the significance of their relationship. Another story is about
another opera singer, a man named Domnil, who tried to
hit on Julie and when she rejected him, he spat

(14:07):
at her feet and insulted her singing voice. Julie challenged
him to a duel and quickly disarmed him. Rather than
stab him, she beat him a few times with a
cane and stole his snuffbox and his watch for good measure.
A few days following their altercation, Julie came across Dominil
surrounded by a group of swooning admirers. He was bandaged

(14:31):
and bruised, and he was telling a dramatic story about
how he was assaulted by a gang of thieves, at
least half a dozen of them. It's true, they stole
my watch in my snuffbox before I managed to fight
them off, he moaned. Julie rolled her eyes. Oh my god,
she dug into her pockets. There you go, she said,

(14:54):
flinging the watch and the snuff box back at him.
Band of thieves. Huh, I guess it's better than telling
your little friend that I whipped your butt. It's a
good story. But Julie Dubney's real moment of scandal and
triumph would occur later at a party held by the
King's brother, an event that would come to be known

(15:16):
as the evening of Gasps. Dressed as a man, like
she so often did, Julie swept into the party and
immediately locked eyes with a beautiful young lady. Julie requested
that the woman dance with her, and when the song
was over, Julie dipped the woman and, in full view
of the party, kissed her square on the lips. Night

(15:39):
of Gasps. Indeed, the kiss would have been bad enough,
but unbeknownst to Julie, the woman had three male suitors
at the party, and all three of them, red faced
and huffing, challenged Julie to a duel. Okay, she said
in the guard in, Julie dueled the three suitors one

(16:03):
at a time, and she beat each one, dueling being illegal.
Julie acquired yet another pardon from the King. This one
was granted because of the merciful intervention of the King's brother,
the party host, who assured the King that it was
all in good fun. But before the pardon came through,

(16:23):
Julie fled France, at least temporarily, until the heat died down.
In Brussels, she began an affair with the Elector of Bavaria,
although during a performance trying to make headlines, she used
a real dagger instead of a stage dagger to stab herself,
a shallow stabbing, but is stabbing. Nonetheless, the elector, shocked

(16:46):
and clearly regretting the relationship, offered Julie forty thousand francs
to politely end the relationship. In Spain, Julie worked as
a lady's maid to a wealthy countess who was so
horrible that Julie stayed in her employ only long enough
to pull a prank. One evening, the countess was dressing

(17:08):
for a grand ball, and Julie was tasked with helping
her to style her elaborate hair do. Julie studdied the
back of the countess's hair with radishes so that everyone
but her would be able to see them. Before the
countess came back to her palace that evening, Julie was
already gone back to France. Julie's final recorded love affair

(17:33):
was in seventeen oh three, when she fell in love
with a woman named Madame Le Marquis de Florencac, sometimes
referenced at the time as the most beautiful woman in
all of France. La Florence Sock was so beautiful that
the daufas himself became dangerously obsessed with her, and La
florence Sock had to flee herself for some years to

(17:56):
protect herself from the unwanted advances of a powerful man.
According to some, Julie and La Florensock lived in domestic
bliss for two years until La Florensock died of a fever.
Julie was thirty one years old, and she would only
live two more years, herself, dying in seventeen o seventy,

(18:18):
at an age we can estimate around thirty three. Some
say that, heartbroken and alone, she went to live and
die in a convent. To me, that ending of Julie
dying sad and alone in a convent reeks of a
morality tale propaganda after her death, see here was a

(18:38):
sinful woman, and she died young and desperate to repent.
It seems far more likely, at least to me, that
Julie would have died in the heart of the city
after a night on stage or at a tavern that
she made her stage. At least in my imagination, it
was a night that she spent meeting strangers and making

(19:00):
them fall in love with her. That's the story of
the life of Julie Daubney. But continue listening after a
brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about
her legacy in the twenty one century. Julie Dubney might

(19:31):
seem like a strange choice for a popular modern heroine,
considering that she lived in the sixteen hundreds and that
we know so very little about her actual life. But
then again, she is a bisexual swordswoman who seduced her
way across Europe. In two thousand and thirteen, Julie Dubney

(19:52):
had something of a modern online renaissance, not on a
history website, but on of all places, Umbler. That sweet
strange blog site became a hub for Julie Daubney fan art.
People from around the world have drawn the fencing frenchwoman

(20:12):
in all manner of dress, from pirate garb to Marie
Antoinette esque ball gowns. Even several centuries later, people continue
to be inspired by just the idea of Julie Daubney,
a woman larger than life who can become anything that
we want her to be. Noble Blood is a production

(20:38):
of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky.
The show was written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive
producers include Aaron Minky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The
show is produced by rima Ill Kali and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at

(20:59):
Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M hmmm,