French secret agent from whose name the term eonism denoting the tendency to adopt the costume and manners of the opposite sex is derived.
His first mission was to the Russian empress Elizabeth in 1755 on which he seems to have disguised himself as a woman. After good service as a dragoon captain he went to London in 1762, returned to Versailles with the Treaty of Paris (1763), ratified and received the cross of St. Louis.
He was sent back to London with secret instruction for espionage from Louis XV; he quarrelled with the French ambassador but refused to return home, claiming that Louis had instructed him to hide in London disguised as a woman. In 1755 in need of money, he told another secret agent, the French dramatist Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais that he really was a woman. Beaumarchais arranged a pension for him but Éon was ordered to return to France wearing a woman´s dress. Commanded by the king to stop wearing the uniform of the dragoons, he thenceforth dressed as a woman.
He returned to London in 1785 where after his death, speculation about his sex was settled by an autopsy that certified him as a male.
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