Julie d'Aubigny

Uncommon card · No. 83459

Julie d'Aubigny (French: [ʒyli dobiɲi]; 1673–1707), better known as Mademoiselle Maupin or La Maupin, was a French opera singer. Little is known for certain about her life beyond her position as a soloist at the Paris Opera and some of the roles she sang there; her tumultuous career and flamboyant lifestyle were the subject of gossip, rumour, and colourful stories in her own time, and inspired numerous fictional and semi-fictional portrayals afterwards. Her life loosely inspired the titular character of Théophile Gautier's 1835 novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which she employs multiple disguises to seduce a young man and his mistress. Due to her relationships with men and women, some modern-day sources refer to d'Aubigny as bisexual or queer. Closer to her own lifetime, she was referred to in 1775 as "the new Sappho," and it was said that her "singular taste... for persons of her sex was so lively, that she exposed herself to frequent contempt on their part.”

Read on Wikipedia · Image Adam Cuerden, Public domain