Why did the king’s brother wear dresses?
I once wrote about the woman who took Louis XIV’s virginity (much to his mother’s delight). What that article didn’t mention is that Louis XIV had a younger brother, Philippe (1640-1701), who later became Duke of Orléans. While, as we saw, Louis XIV’s mother tried to turn her older son into a ladies’ man, she tried to turn her younger son into something else entirely: a lady.
Anne of Austria (1601-1666) tried to make Philippe effeminate because she feared he would rebel against his brother, just as the previous Duke of Orléans, Gaston (1608-1660), had rebelled against his own brother, Louis XIII (r. 1610-1643). But if Philippe became effeminate, he would lack the legitimacy to rule, which would greatly reduce the odds that he’d ever challenge the king’s authority and spark a civil war.
The queen’s plan worked better than she could have hoped. Philippe, though a genuinely brave soldier, grew into an openly homosexual man with famously feminine mannerisms. That’s how the queen managed to remove a potential political threat to her firstborn son.
Monsieur de Choisy decides to become a lady
Anne of Austria had a close friend, the Countess of Choisy, who decided that in order for her young son François to build a career, he needed to become close friends with the Duke of Orléans. She achieved this by dressing her son in women’s clothing and turning him into a kind of companion for the duke, who, as mentioned, loved wearing dresses himself.
The countess’s plan succeeded, and the two children became good friends who loved dressing up in the finest gowns of the era. But while Philippe gradually switched to men’s clothing as he grew older, François, who was handsome and had no facial hair, decided to keep wearing dresses. He even adopted a new identity: Madame de Sancy.
His love of women’s clothing turned “Madame de Sancy” into something of a fashion guru, and quite a few of Paris’s noble families started bringing their daughters to him for style advice. But adopting a feminine identity created two unexpected problems for the young man.
The first problem was that his new identity clashed a bit with the fact that he had chosen a career in the church and had even received the title of abbé. The second problem was that, despite loving to dress as a woman, he was actually attracted to women himself, and a few years after moving to the Mouffetard neighborhood of Paris, it turned out he had gotten one of the local young women pregnant.
This led to a scandal that forced him to flee Paris and pose as an actress, a role he managed to pull off successfully for about six months. Once he grew tired of the theater world, he decided to adopt a new feminine identity as the Comtesse des Barres and moved to live near the city of Bourges.
One day, at a literary salon in town, he met Madame de Coudrée, who was known as the greatest matchmaker of her era. Madame de Coudrée, who had no idea that the “Comtesse des Barres” was actually a man, tried to set him up with Monsieur de Bergère, the first secretary to the finance minister Colbert.
Choisy played along with the plan, but Monsieur de Bergère quickly recognized him, since he was well aware of Choisy’s exploits in Paris. Once de Choisy’s true identity came to light, Bergère took him aside for a private conversation and tried to convince him to abandon his current way of life.
At first, his arguments fell on deaf ears, and Monsieur de Choisy refused to give up his feminine identity. But then Bergère played his winning card: he told Choisy that a bishop’s purple robe, or a cardinal’s red one, would suit the color of his eyes very well, and since Catholic clergy vestments resemble women’s clothing anyway, he could pursue a well-paid career and keep dressing however he liked. In short, he could have his cake and eat it too.
From the church to the kingdom of Siam and back
And so began Choisy’s impressive church career. In 1676, he joined Emmanuel Théodose de La Tour d’Auvergne, Cardinal de Bouillon (1643-1715), the king’s envoy to the pope, and served as his assistant. In 1685, he joined Alexandre, Chevalier de Chaumont (1640-1710), and set off for Siam (modern-day Thailand) to convert as many of the local people to Christianity as possible.
Here too, Choisy found great success and managed to convert quite a few locals (and who knows, maybe along the way he also taught a lady or two a thing or two). Following his success in Siam, he was admitted to the Académie Française in 1687 and wrote several essays on the French language together with Charles Perrault (1628-1703), the famous writer known for, among other things, Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots. In 1696, he returned to Siam, this time as ambassador, and after several more years he came back to France, where he continued a rich career in both the church and literature.
Choisy died in Paris at the age of eighty in 1724. Right up to his final days, despite his career in the church, he kept dressing as a woman from time to time, saying that “God loves beauty, which creates love, and beauty is woman’s domain”…
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