Julie d'Aubigny known as La Maupin

Julie d'Aubigny was born in the stables of the Count of Armagnac. Not metaphorically: her father was the master of the stables, responsible for training the pages in arms and horsemanship. The child thus grew up surrounded by swords, horses, and elegantly crafted oaths. At seven, she wielded the foil better than most teenagers. At ten, she rode sidesaddle with a grace that made one forget she would have preferred a man's saddle. The Count of Armagnac noticed this prodigy and decided to complete her education. He taught her fencing, dancing, and music. He also taught her—a detail that would prove crucial—how to behave in society as if the rules only applied to her incidentally. At fifteen, she was married to a Monsieur de Maupin, a conscientious civil servant who had the wisdom to leave to take up his post in the provinces very soon after the wedding. Julie kept her name and her freedom, which suited her perfectly.

She then took as her lover a fencing master named Sérannes. When he had to leave Paris abruptly—a matter of honor, a duel, the details are of little importance—Julie followed him without hesitation. They traveled through the provinces, giving sword fights. Julie wore men's clothing, which scandalized the respectable people and delighted the paying audiences. She fought duels with the local young roosters who refused to believe that a woman could disarm them in three passes.


She invariably disarmed them in three passes.

In Marseille, she met a young woman from a good family. It was love at first sight, but alas, it was thwarted by vigilant parents who promptly locked their daughter away in a convent. Julie was not one to be discouraged by bars and Carmelites. She took the veil—a false veil, but true determination—was admitted as a novice, and organized her beloved's escape.



To throw them off the scent, she had an idea that the most audacious novelist would never have dared: she placed the corpse of a recently deceased nun in her friend's bed and set fire to the dormitory. While the sisters extinguished the fire and mourned the poor, consumed novice, the two fugitives galloped toward freedom.
The adventure lasted three months. Then the young woman, having no doubt considered the implications of a life on the run with an arsonist, wisely returned to her parents' home. Julie, condemned in absentia to be burned at the stake for kidnapping and arson, deemed it prudent to return to Paris to seek a royal pardon.
She obtained it. The Count of Armagnac was influential, and Louis XIV appreciated entertaining stories, provided they did not threaten the order of the kingdom.


Julie then decided to dedicate herself seriously to opera. She had a remarkable contralto voice, rich and deep, perfect for heroic roles. The Royal Academy of Music engaged her. Within a few months, she became one of the stars of the Opera, applauded in Cadmus and Hermione, Tancred, and Medea. On stage, she embodied goddesses and queens with a conviction that owed much to the fact that she saw no reason to consider herself inferior to them.
Offstage, she continued to live by her own rules. She attended masked balls dressed as a man, seduced whomever she pleased without regard to gender, and readily accepted challenges to duels. One evening, at the Opera ball, she kissed a young woman. Three gentlemen, offended by this display, provoked her.
She gave them a rendezvous the next day at dawn, behind the Luxembourg Gardens.
She wounded all three of them. None fatally—Julie was a skilled swordswoman, not a killer—but enough to ensure they remembered the lesson for a long time. Dueling the same opponent was already a crime. Three at once was pure provocation. Another condemnation, another exile, another royal pardon. Louis XIV was beginning to find the repetition tiresome, but the Opera audience clamored for its Maupin. You don't argue with the public.
She sang for a few more years, triumphing in the roles of warriors and tragic heroines. Between performances, she continued to cause minor scandals—an affair with a foreign princess here, a duel with an officer there. Nothing truly serious. Simply Julie stubbornly refusing to conform to the expectations of her age.
Then, around 1705, she disappeared from the records. Some say she retired to a convent—voluntarily this time. Others claim she died in poverty. The archives remain silent. It is believed that she died around 1707, barely thirty-seven years old. A brief, dazzling, impossible life. The kind of existence novelists dare not invent, for fear of being accused of implausibility.

And yet, she had existed.
She had sung, loved, fought, and lived exactly as she saw fit, in a century that offered women only three options: marriage, the convent, or oblivion.
Julie d'Aubigny had chosen a fourth path: her own.