The Amazing Life Of Julie D’Aubigny, The Bisexual, Sword-Fighting 17th-Century Opera Star
- Daniel Holland
- Mar 21, 2022
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 1
Julie d’Aubigny, better known to history as La Maupin, remains one of the most elusive and intriguing figures of late seventeenth century France. She appears in memoirs, court records, scandal sheets, and later biographies as a woman who fought duels, sang leading operatic roles, loved openly across gender lines, and refused to submit quietly to social expectations. Yet much about her life remains uncertain. Her exact birthdate is unknown. Her place of death is disputed. Even some of her most famous exploits sit in the uneasy space between documentation and legend. What survives, however, is enough to sketch a portrait of a woman who lived persistently at odds with the structures of absolutist France.
A childhood inside the machinery of power
Born around 1673, Julie was the only child of Gaston d’Aubigny, secretary to the Count d’Armagnac, one of the great nobles of France and Master of Horse to Louis XIV. This placed her, from birth, within the orbit of royal authority. As a child she is believed to have lived at the royal riding school at the Tuileries Palace in Paris, before moving with the court to Versailles in 1682. Her formative years were spent in the Grande Écurie, the Great Stables, an environment dominated by horses, discipline, and martial skill rather than embroidery or domestic instruction.
Julie’s upbringing was highly unusual for a girl of her time. Her father was an accomplished swordsman who trained the court pages in fencing, and he educated his daughter alongside the boys. She dressed as a boy, not as a theatrical gesture but as a practical necessity within that world, and she proved herself an exceptional fencer from an early age. This was not merely recreational. In a society where duelling remained a deeply embedded, if illegal, expression of honour, swordsmanship was a social language, and Julie learned it fluently.
Marriage, patronage, and escape
By the age of fourteen, Julie had already entered the adult world of court politics and sexual patronage. She became the mistress of the Count d’Armagnac, her father’s employer, and the relationship quickly led to an arranged marriage to a minor noble, the sieur de Maupin. The marriage appears to have been largely administrative. Some accounts claim her husband was sent off to a provincial tax post the morning after the wedding. Whether literal or embellished, the result was the same. Julie was effectively unencumbered.
She soon tired of life under d’Armagnac’s control and fled Paris with a fencing master named Séranne. The pair travelled the countryside, earning what they could through fencing demonstrations in taverns and at fairs. These performances were part livelihood, part spectacle. One oft repeated story, which appears in several early accounts, recalls a man refusing to believe she was a woman because her skill with a sword was simply too great. Julie responded by removing her blouse in front of the crowd. The challenge ended there.
Opera, desire, and a death sentence
It was in Marseille that Julie’s second great talent emerged. She joined the local opera company and began singing professionally, quickly attracting attention for the power and darkness of her voice. Among her admirers was a young woman whose name has not survived in the historical record. Their relationship prompted swift intervention from the woman’s family, who sent her to a convent in Avignon.
Julie followed. Entering the convent as a postulant, she waited. When an elderly nun died, Julie and her lover stole the body, placed it in the girl’s cell, set fire to the building, and escaped into the night. The incident caused outrage. Julie was tried in absentia by the Parliament of Provence and sentenced to death under the name “sieur de Maupin”. The judges, as one historian dryly observed, found it easier to imagine a man abducting a woman than to acknowledge the possibility of one woman rescuing another.
The couple remained on the run for several months before the girl was eventually returned to her family. Julie continued alone, once again dressed as a man, moving between towns and living by her wits.
Duels and friendship
During this period, Julie encountered the Comte d’Albert, a young nobleman who challenged her to a duel after a chance collision. Unaware of her sex, he fought her and was wounded. Julie nursed him back to health. Some later writers would describe him as the great romance of her life. What is more securely attested is that they became lifelong friends, and that he remained a loyal presence in her story long after many lovers had fallen away.
She also began formal vocal training with a retired teacher named Maréchal, refining a voice that did not fit comfortably into existing French operatic conventions.
Paris and professional legitimacy
Julie returned to Paris accompanied by her new lover, Gabriel Vincent Thévenard, an ambitious singer. On their first day in the city, Thévenard auditioned for the Paris Opéra and was hired immediately. He insisted that Julie also be allowed to audition. The Opéra, reluctantly, agreed.
She was seventeen.
At the same time, Julie sought out d’Armagnac, persuading him to arrange a royal pardon for her conviction in Provence. Louis XIV agreed, and Julie entered the Opéra legally and openly. From 1690 to 1694 she appeared in nearly all of its major productions. Audiences adored her. She became known simply as La Maupin.
Her presence on the stage mattered. French opera had largely favoured lighter female voices, while lower ranges were typically reserved for men. Julie’s contralto challenged this division. Without formal declaration, she expanded what female voices were permitted to sound like in public, and her success made that change difficult to reverse.
Scandal as routine
Offstage, her life remained combustible. At a court ball she attended dressed as a man and kissed a young woman on the dance floor. Three noblemen challenged her to duels. She arranged to meet each of them, fought them all together, and defeated them. Since duelling had been repeatedly outlawed by royal edict, she fled to Brussels, where she became the lover of the Elector of Bavaria.
Her time there ended theatrically. During a performance she stabbed herself on stage with a real dagger. Alarmed and exhausted, the Elector offered her 40,000 francs to leave. She threw the money at his emissary’s feet and departed for Madrid.
In Spain she worked briefly as a maid to a countess she disliked intensely. On the night of a grand ball, Julie dressed the woman’s hair with radishes so that everyone but the countess could see them. She fled before the humiliation was discovered.
Return, excess, and devotion
Back in Paris, Julie was pardoned once again, this time through the intervention of Monsieur, the King’s brother. She returned to the Opéra and resumed her position at the centre of Parisian musical life. She performed at Versailles, appeared in major productions, and further established the contralto voice in French opera.
Her behaviour remained erratic. She defended chorus girls from predatory nobles, clashed violently with fellow performers, became obsessed with the soprano Fanchon Moreau, attempted suicide, threatened aristocrats, and found herself repeatedly in court for assault. Her friendship with Thévenard endured despite public quarrels, including one infamous performance during which she bit his ear hard enough to draw blood.
Through it all, the audience stayed with her. In spite of her breeches, her sword, her affairs with women, and her refusal to behave discreetly, she remained popular. Perhaps because of it.
Love and withdrawal
In 1703, Julie fell in love with Madame la Marquise de Florensac, described by Saint Simon as the most beautiful woman in France. The two lived together for two years in what one account called perfect harmony. When Florensac died suddenly of a fever, Julie was devastated.
After this loss, she withdrew from public life entirely. She entered a convent and disappears from the record soon after. One later biographer claimed she died at the age of thirty three, “destroyed by an inclination to do evil in the sight of her God and a fixed intention not to”, adding that her body was discarded without ceremony. The tone of this account tells us as much about its author as about Julie.
Afterlife of a reputation
La Maupin’s story has been retold and reshaped for more than three centuries. Romantic writers emphasised her defiance. Later historians attempted to separate documentation from embellishment. Modern readers often see in her life an early challenge to rigid ideas of gender and desire, though any attempt to impose contemporary labels risks flattening the complexity of her world.
What remains clear is that Julie d’Aubigny lived deliberately and visibly on her own terms, inside a society that rarely forgave such behaviour. She survived not by retreating from the system, but by navigating it with extraordinary audacity, talent, and refusal to apologise.
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