is a Japanese anime television series produced by Production I.G based on an original story by Tow Ubukata. The anime originally aired in Japan on WOWOW from August 19, 2006, to February 2, 2007. The story has also been adapted into a manga series written by Tow Ubukata and illustrated by Kiriko Yumeji, which was first published in 2005. The title character is loosely based on the historical figure Chevalier d'Éon, who lived in the middle of 18th-century, pre-Revolutionary France under the reign of Louis XV.
Le Chevalier D'Eon was originally licensed to the North American market by ADV Films, but it became one of over thirty titles transferred from ADV Films to Funimation in 2008.
Plot
The story begins in Paris 1742, when the body of a woman named Lia de Beaumont is found in a casket floating along the Seine. The only clue regarding her death is the word "Psalms", which is written in blood on the lid of the casket. D'Eon de Beaumont, Lia's younger brother and a knight in service of King Louis XV, takes it upon himself to investigate his sister's mysterious death, along with the strange disappearances of a number of French women. By order of the King of France, he is to recover the Royal Psalms which is linked to the mysterious death of his sister and the case of the missing women. At the beginning of his journey to find the Royal Psalms, he is accompanied by a young boy named Robin, appointed to him by the Queen, a gentleman named Durand, who is an old colleague of his sister, and his old master, Teillagory. The four musketeers traverse across France, Russia, and England trying to get closer to the truth and the Royal Psalms. However, it is soon known to them that a fifth member is in their party. Loyalties are tested as they usher further down the path of the Royal Psalms.
Themes
The series' themes center around 18th-century France, which Ubukata believes to have resulted in a new set of cultural traditions as well as several tragedies. According to him, "the problems stemmed from the fact that no one knew exactly which ideas would lead to greater happiness. In a word, they were forced to live under the burden of contradiction." This is what made the Chevalier d'Eon a "fitting figure to cast as protagonist" because he embodied all of the contradictions of that time period, which Ubukata lists as "Wealth and poverty, faith and heresy, diplomacy and conspiracy, king and commoner, even the devastation of war and the flowering of culture." Ubukata also used this theme in conceptualizing the use of psalms as "dark magic". He said that he "hoped that the irony of using the abstract idea of 'prayers to God' to describe evil would be seen as equally tragic by people of many different faiths and religions."
Production
Creation and conception
toi8 of Studio 4°C was initially asked to work on the series' character designs, but the job was passed on to his wife, Tomomi Ozaki, due to time constraints. According to Ozaki, director Kazuhiro Furuhashi requested that the characters "should not look like manga characters or too real; and not too anime-like," and that he wanted the designs to be faithful to historical details. Ozaki sometimes referred to historical portraits from the series' time period as reference for her designs, as well as actors in Western films, mentioning that she referred to Brigitte Bardot's hairstyles while designing Anna Rochefort's hairstyles, and used Brad Pitt as the reference for Durand.
Writing
Scriptwriter Shotaro Suga was contacted by Tetsuya Nakatake at the beginning of the project, and agreed to work with them when he was informed that Tow Ubukata and Kazuhiro Furuhashi were taking part in the production. He was unable to work on the project immediately, as he was also working on Eureka Seven at the time. Suga admitted to being nervous about working with Furuhashi, whom he described as an "experienced director" because the other series he worked on (such as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Blood+, Eureka Seven, and Casshern) were by first-time directors. He described the script readings for Le Chevalier D'Eon as "ever more intense" than his previous projects, and that they all "kept on debating to scrutinize each and every detail." Chief writer Yasuyuki Muto noted that their script meetings lasted as long as twelve hours.