Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to

explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. In 1764, an unprecedented scandal rocked the French court.

Someone close to King Louis XIV had become a whistleblower.

This former spy published a series of letters detailing correspondence with the French

King during and after the Seven Years' War.

The spy in question was a member of a secret circle of

spies for King Louis, who interfaced with both England and Russia on behalf of France.

The individual who had leaked these conversations was already a figure of great interest,

a dashing 36-year-old war hero named Charles de Beaumont, or the Chevalier

Dion. The child of relatively poor French nobility, Dion was well-liked among the court,

a charming, strikingly handsome individual who was quite renowned as a fencer. In fact,

the title Chevalier was the French equivalent of Knight and had been

bestowed upon Dion the year before for helping to draft a peace treaty that ended the

seven years' war. And yet, things seemed to have soured between the young noble and the French

monarch. After a swashbuckling career that involved fighting the English, negotiating in Russia,

and successfully dressing as a woman to accomplish secret missions, Dion was usurped by the subsequent

ambassador to England and demoted, an absolute insult to someone with Dion's qualifications.

Rather than taking this line down, Dion had retaliated, which brings us to that series of letters published

in 1764. They were alarming to King Louis the 15th, but what was even more alarming is that

Dion held back. Louis had corresponded with Dion for years about a potential French invasion of

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