Noble Blood - Lovers and La Maupin

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

A bisexual, sword-fighting, opera-singing, 17th century arsonist... no wonder there are so many stories about her. [Side note: I wrote a book! It's a gothic love story about 19th century Edinburgh, and you can pre-order here: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/anatomy-a-love-story/] Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. Video on Demand.

This guy's bobo-bubim. 2 a whatever time it is. Lizzie McGuire. And I'm like, the paper view. It was like a first closet moment from me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful.

But I'm appreciating her. in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like, but listen to Los Coleristas on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised.

The woman was fencing in a tavern, brandishing her sword in wide circles and curly cues with a showman's air for performance. She shouted and, leapt onto a bench, her opponent did the same. The pair of them clinked swords as they half-fought, half-danced, up onto the long table. It helped her agility that the woman was wearing men's clothing, boots and pants. The woman smiled and winked at the patrons, lifting their mugs of ale at her, even as she defended herself from parries and jabs. Her name was Julie Dobney, and soon she would be a legend.

The sword fight wasn't really a sword fight. It was a performance, a fenting demonstration between Julie and her lover, a swordsman named Sorin. He had trained her for months while they toured together from town to town, tavern to tavern around France, and now people said that her skills surpassed even his. When the fighting portion of the entertainment was over, Julie remained standing on the table at the tavern and began to sink, in a beautiful, clear contralto voice that she could make thick with emotion on cue. Soon, the drunken tavern patrons were joining in on the choruses, stomping their feet and slapping their thighs in time to the beat.

When the song quieted down, one drunken reveller teetered, spilling his drink from the sides of his cup. She's not even a real lady, he shouted. No woman dresses or fences like that. It's a man! Julie Dobney smiled. Without a word, she removed her jacket, unbuttoned her blouse, and showed the heckler and half of the pub her naked breasts. That story about Julie Dobney,

the woman who would go on to enchant Paris as the unfauntary ble of the opera world, is apocryphal, as are so many of the stories about her life. Julie Dobney was, even in her lifetime, a figure larger than life, who scandalized and quickly became sensationalized. Her biography seems ripped from a romance novel. It's only fitting that it's been fictionalized dozens of times in different iterations. She is the archetype, at least in my mind, for a number of female characters in period pieces, that girl who fences and seduces, who runs away and gets into trouble, only to

seduce her way out of trouble. Julie was a nobleman's mistress, a fencer, a nun, and an opera singer, all before she was 20. Because so much of her life has been borrowed or fabricated, either to fit the mold of an adventure story or a cautionary tale, it's almost impossible to tease out what actually happened in real life. All we have are the stories, and so I'll tell you the story of the woman who became known as La Mupin and leave you with the terrible burden of knowing that some of it might be too outlandish to be true. But then again, it might not be. If Julie Dobney can teach us anything, it's that people who live and love with outlandish passion can sometimes lead

extraordinary lives. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. We don't know for sure when Julie Dubney was born, but we can guess that it was around 1673. She was the only child to a man named Gaston, who worked as the secretary to the Comte d'Armniac. The Comte Arminiac was King Louis 14th's Master of the Horse. And so, as the daughter of his secretary, Julie spent much of her childhood at the riding school at the Tuileries in Paris before she eventually moved with the court to Versailles, where she lived in the great stables. Maybe because her father had had no sons and Julie was his only child, but for whatever reason, Julie received a courtly education both in manners and in sword-fighting.

Her father, Gaston, was an accomplished swordsman, and one of his duties at Versailles was training the page boys in the basics. Julie learned alongside them, becoming adept and then astonishingly good, all before puberty. At some point in her adolescence, her father died. And it was also around that time that her father's boss, the Comte d'Armagnac, took Julie as his mistress. Julie was around 14 or 15 at that time. She was a child, and the Comte was an adult man, and so even in the 17th century, I think it's worth noting the power dynamics that would have been at play there.

A sexual relationship with the count was one of Julie's few ways of gain. any leverage whatsoever over her future. And the Comte was the one who made the decision that, with her father dead, Julie would need an arranged marriage. And so he married her off to a tax collector named Mupin, who then conveniently was sent out of town. But Julie wouldn't stick around town much longer either. She ran away with a fencing master named Saron, who became her next lover. depending on the stories, Saron murdered a man in a duel, and since duels were illegal,

he had to flee town. Julie came with him. And so the pair of them toured through France, performing at fencing demonstrations in taverns and at local fairs. But Julie grew tired of her lover and their profession equally quickly, and when the pair reached the south of France,

she abandoned Seraan and began to sing in the opera at Marseille. it was there as a teenage opera singer that she drew the attention of a local merchant's daughter who happened to be in the audience one night. This is the story from Julie's life that I find the most outlandish, but it's also one of the stories with the most evidence. The pieces are there, and so it's up to us as historians to piece them together into a way that makes some semblance of sense. Again, this is a story, stranger than fiction, in almost every single sense. That merchant's daughter watched Julie on stage, and Julie, on stage, saw the girl in the audience gazing up at her.

The two began an affair that became an open secret and that scandalized the local community, and the merchant, in a fit of fury and misplaced fatherly protectiveness, banished his daughter to a a convent. But Julie was in love and convent walls couldn't keep her away from her lover. Julie herself entered the convent, pretending to be interested in becoming a nun, as if any career path could have been further from the life that she had lived up until that point. Julie and the merchant's daughter began thinking of ways that they could run away together, elaborate schemes that would buy them the freedom that they wanted. conveniently enough for them, one of the elderly nuns in the convent happened to die from unrelated causes.

Seeing an opportunity, Julie allegedly dug up the body, put it into her lover's bedroom, and then tipped a candle over to start a fire. The idea was that people would see the dead body burnt beyond recognition and assume that the merchant's daughter had died. Then the merchant's daughter and Julie would be free to start a new life. But the candle did it work too well. Soon the entire convent was up in flames. And though their plot was quickly discovered, Julie and the merchant's daughter were able to escape in the chaos.

Julie was sentenced by the Parliament in Provence in absentia for arson, for body snatching, and for kidnapping. Julie's sentence was death. Peculiarly enough, the sentence was for Esseigne de Moupin, as if Julie were a man. It seems that the court wanted to spare the merchant's family from the final public humiliation of their daughter having run away with another woman. The merchant's daughter would have her own humiliation soon enough. When Julie tired of her new lover, she deposited her back.

at her parents' house. Julie was still on the run and once again alone, but loneliness never stuck to Julie Dobny. Her next partner wouldn't be romantic, but instead one of the most defining friendships of her life. While near Poitier, she encountered an old actor who had once been a celebrated singing teacher. His name was Maheshel,

and though his alcoholism left him teetering on the edge of ruin, Julie stayed with him for a while and learned from him. It was his encouragement that ultimately spurred Julie into auditioning for the prestigious Paris Opera. Julie auditioned and didn't get in. She auditioned again, rejected again. But she would make another friend, a lover this time, a rising star who had just been accepted by the Paris Opera himself. His name was Gabriel Vincent Taven. and he whispered to the people in power that they should give Julie another chance.

They did, and this time her audition impressed them. The Parisian opera even helped convince the king to pardon Julie for her youthful arson in discretions, and the king obliged. And so, Julie Dobny joined the opera. As a willful woman prone to picking fights and to dressing in men's clothing, she was never going to be a fit for the operatic roles of an ingenue soprano. Roles were instead written for her as a contralto, roles of powerful women, goddesses, and enchantresses.

Though Julie was married, all opera singers, married or not, performed as Mademoiselle. And so, Julie began her tenure on stage as Mademoiselle de Moupon, or as she would become famous, La Mouin. From here, Julie Dobney's life rolls through wild-sounding stories as if in montage. In her lifetime, she became famous as an opera singer, but less for her voice and more for her excopades off the stage. It's the same situation you might imagine befalling an actor today, who's maybe not quite as talented as some other performers, but who still always manages to appear on the front page of tabloids.

These stories come from wildly disparate sources, and very few of them have the type of specific details that might make me more confident in them as fact, or at least confident in where they occurred in Julie's biography. And to make matters even more complicated, after Julie's death, the French writer Thieffield Gautier wrote a novel called Mademoiselle de Mopin, which was only loosely based on the real life of its namesake character, but which plenty of readers mistook and continued to mistake for a fact. One of those stories begins with Julie in her favorite place in the world, performing for a crowd. She was at a tavern, an afterpart. and the crowd was growing slightly rowdier than normal. One man named Delber was emboldened by the atmosphere

and by the several drinks he had already imbibed. And now for my next song, La Mouinpard. Dalbert shouted back, I've listened to your chirping, but now tell me of your plumage. It was a 17th century, come on. Julie's sword was drawn before the drunken smile even fell from Delbert's face. The man tried briefly to defend himself against her swift sword work, but it was a useless attempt. Julie parried and ran her sword clean through his shoulder.

Later, Julie felt guilty. He had been drunk and he had been flirting. Did he really deserve a blade all the way through and coming out the other side of his body? So she visited him in the hospital, and, depending on the story you believe, she and the man, Dalbert, either became longtime lovers or friends. Some fictionalized versions of Julie's life even frame Dalbert as her primary love interest, a lover who spanned the rest of her life.

But I have to assume that that's maybe based more on the power of the meat cute and less on actual source evidence of the significance of their relationship. Another story is about another opera singer, a man named Duminil who tried to hit on Julie, and when she rejected him, he spat at her feet and insulted her singing voice. Julie challenged him to a duel and quickly disarmed him. Rather than stab him, she beat him a few times with a cane and stole his snuffbox and his watch

for good measure. A few days following their altercation, Julie came across. Dumas, Dumonil, surrounded by a group of swooning admirers. He was bandaged and bruised, and he was telling a dramatic story about how he was assaulted by a gang of thieves, at least half a dozen of them. It's true. They stole my watch and my snuffbox before I managed to fight them off, he moaned. Julie rolled her eyes. Oh my God, she dug into her pockets. There you go, she said, flinging the watch and the snuff-box. back at him. Band of thieves, huh? I guess it's better than telling your little friend that I whipped

your butt. It's a good story, but Julie Dubney's real moment of scandal and triumph would occur later at a party held by the king's brother, an event that would come to be known as the evening of gasps. Dressed as a man, like she so often did, Julie swept into the party and immediately locked eyes with a beautiful young lady. Julie requested that the woman dance with her, and when the song was over, Julie dipped the woman and, in full view of the party, kissed her square on the lips. Night of gasps, indeed. The kiss would have been bad enough, but unbeknownst to Julie, the woman had three male suitors at the party, and all three of them, red-faced and huffing, challenged Julie to a duel. Okay, she said. In the garden, Julie dueled the three suitors one at a time,

and she beat each one. Dueling being illegal, Julie required yet another pardon from the king. This one was granted because of the merciful intervention of the king's brother, the party host, who assured the king that it was all in good fun. But before the pardon came through, Julie fled France, at least temporarily, until the heat died down. In Brussels, she began an affair with the Elector of Bavaria, although during a performance, trying to make headlines, she used a real dagger instead of a stage dagger to stab herself. A shallow stabbing, but a stabbing nonetheless.

The elector, shocked and clearly regretting the relationship, offered Julie 40, 40,000 francs to politely end the relationship. In Spain, Julie worked as a ladies-maid to a wealthy countess who was so horrible that Julie stayed in her employ only long enough to pull a prank. One evening, the countess was dressing for a grand ball, and Julie was tasked with helping her to style her elaborate hairdo. Julie studded the back of the countess's hair with radishes so that everyone but her would be able to see them. Before the countess came back to her palace that evening, Julie was already gone. Back to France. Julie's final recorded love affair was in 1703 when she fell in love with a woman named Madame

La Marquise de Florence, sometimes referenced at the time as the most beautiful woman in all of France. La Florensac was so beautiful that the Defant himself became dangerously obsessed with her, and La Floressoc had to flee herself for some years to protect herself from the unwanted advances of a powerful man. According to some, Julie and LaFlorantsoc lived in domestic bliss for two years until LaFlorantsoc died of a fever. Julie was 31 years old, and she would only live two more years herself, dying in 1770 at an age we can estimate around 33. Some say that heartbroken and alone, she went to live and die in a convent. To me, that ending of Julie dying, sad and alone in a convent reeks of a morality tale, propaganda after her death. See, here was a sinful woman, and she died young and desperate to repent.

It seems far more likely, at least to me, that Julie would have died in the heart of the city after a night on stage or at a tavern that she made her stage. At least in my imagination, it was a night that she spent meeting strangers and making them fall in love with her. That's the story of the life of Julie Dobney, but continue listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about her legacy in the 21st century. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.

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We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here? Just take it.

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Readers, Katie's finalist. publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. Video on demand this guy's... 2 a.m. Lissie McGuire. And I'm like...

A wild bat you were with. It was like a first closet moment from me where I was like... You're like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like... But listen to Laskol Dris-Drisis and I'm the I-Hart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. Julie Dobney might seem like a strange choice for a popular modern heroine, considering that she lived in the 1600s and that we know so very little about her actual life. But, and again, she is a bisexual swordswoman who seduced her way across Europe. In 2013, Julie Dobney had something of a modern online renaissance. not on a history website, but on, of all places, Tumblr, that sweet, strange blog site became a hub for Julie Dobney fan art. People from around the world have drawn the fencing Frenchwoman in all manner of dress, from pirate garb to Marie Antoinette-esque ball gowns. Even several

centuries later, people continued to be inspired by just the idea of Julie Dobney, a woman larger than life who can become anything that we want her to be. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by Rima Ilkeali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales.com.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio Visit the IHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows Readers, Katie's finalists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys We have our girl Hillary Duff in here And we can't wait for you to hear this episode They put on Lizzie McGuire 2am video on demand

This guy's boo-a-m To a Muguer And I'm like a wild bat you were with It was like a first like closet moment for me Where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful.

But I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like, but listen to Los Angeles on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.