The most famous example of transvestism in history was that of Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, a distinguished diplomat in the service of Louis XV. He was born in 1728 and died at the ripe old age of eighty-three, having spent forty-nine years as a man and thirty-four as a woman. Many people thought him to be an hermaphrodite. Eonism is sometimes taken as a synonym for transvestism.