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# The nuns' duel legend and Mademoiselle Maupin, heroine of Gautier's 1835 novel
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/istoriia-s-dueliu-monakhin-mozhet-proiskhodit-ot-epizoda-iz-zhizni-frantsuzskoi-opernoi-pevitsy-i-fekhtovalshchitsy-mademuazel-mopin/
- Published: 2018-01-30T12:45:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:05:12.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Mores, Paris, People

The tale of the duelling nuns may derive from an episode in the life of the French opera singer and fencer Mademoiselle Maupin. She is said to have dressed as a nun in order to abduct her beloved from a convent, where the girl had been sent by her family's will to avoid disgrace. The duel itself is linked to the need to fend off another nun, or the Mother Superior, who had made Maupin's mistress her favourite. Moreover, there are some wonderful Victorian etchings in which nuns fight with bared breasts.

The life of Julie d'Aubigny, known under the name of Maupin, became the prototype for Théophile Gautier's novel of 1835\. True, there the story is supplemented with a line about stealing a nun's corpse and slipping it into the bed of the captive mistress, so as then to burn her cell and pass the fugitive off as dead.