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The year is 1695. The streets of Paris are slick with rain and illuminated by the flickering, amber glow of oil lanterns. Outside a lavish royal ball hosted by King Louis XIV’s brother, three furious noblemen draw their rapiers, intent on defending their fragile honor. Their opponent? A 22-year-old woman dressed entirely in men’s tailored velvet, who had just brazenly kissed a young lady on the dance floor.
Within minutes, all three men are bleeding on the cobblestones. The woman wipes her blade, adjusts her cravat, and casually strolls back into the ballroom.
This wasn't a scene from a fictional swashbuckling novel. This was just a Tuesday night for Julie d’Aubigny, widely known by her stage name, Mademoiselle Maupin. History is filled with rebels, but few possess the sheer, unadulterated audacity of a woman who dominated the Paris Opera with her contralto voice by day, and dominated underground fencing rings by night.
Born in 1670, Julie was never destined for the quiet, subservient life of a 17th-century French aristocrat. Her father, Gaston d’Aubigny, was the secretary to the Count of Armagnac and was tasked with training the court’s page boys. Instead of banishing his daughter to a drawing room with a needle and thread, Gaston threw her into the courtyard.
Julie trained fiercely alongside the boys. By her early teens, she was already a master of the rapier, fluent in the art of gambling, and possessed a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush. To "tame" her, society forced her into an arranged marriage with a mundane clerk named Sieur de Maupin when she was just 14. Unsurprisingly, the moment he was sent away to the provinces for work, Julie packed her bags, grabbed her sword, and ran off with a master fencing instructor named Sérannes. They fled Paris on horseback, surviving by putting on fencing exhibitions in local taverns where Julie would duel men—and win—while singing rowdy tavern songs.
If her fencing exhibitions were scandalous, her love life was downright criminal. While laying low in Marseille, Julie fell deeply in love with a young merchant's daughter. When the girl's horrified parents discovered the affair, they did what any respectable 17th-century family would do: they locked their daughter away in an Ursuline convent in Avignon to "cure" her.
They severely underestimated Julie d’Aubigny.
Rather than mourn, Julie executed a plan of staggering theatricality. She traveled to Avignon, presented herself as a devout novice, and successfully infiltrated the convent. She bided her time for weeks, learning the layout and the routines of the nuns. When an elderly nun passed away, Julie made her move. Under the cover of darkness, she stole the deceased nun's body, smuggled it into her lover's cell, and set the room—and eventually the entire convent—ablaze. In the ensuing chaos, the two lovers slipped out unnoticed, leaving the family to mourn a charred body they believed was their daughter.
The law eventually caught up, and Julie was sentenced to death in absentia by fire. But Julie d'Aubigny possessed an ultimate trump card: a transcendent, hauntingly beautiful contralto voice.
She eventually secured an audition at the Paris Opera, the most prestigious stage in the world. Her talent was so undeniable that the King's brother personally intervened, successfully petitioning King Louis XIV to pardon her crimes. The Sun King, highly amused by her antics and enamored with her talent, agreed. For the next decade, she became the undisputed queen of the French stage, famous for singing both male and female roles, and occasionally beating up her fellow actors off-stage if they insulted her.