THE BUREAU DE BIENFAISANCE ASYLUM AT VINCENNES.
1. The Façade. 2. The Bowling Green.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
FENCING SCHOOLS.
Fencing in France—A National Art—Some Extracts from the Writings of M. Legouvé, One of its Chief Exponents—The Old Style of Fencing and the New.
FENCING is in England the pastime of a few amateurs; in France it is a national art. An ingenious reason has been adduced by M. Legouvé why proficiency with the rapier should be acquired by everyone. “The sword,” he writes, “possesses the finest of all advantages: it is the only weapon with which you can avenge yourself without an effusion of blood. What is nobler for a man of chivalry and skill when he finds himself confronting the man who has offended him, and whom he is privileged to kill, than at once to punish this adversary and to spare his life—to disarm him, that is to say.”
It is in his character of dramatic author, however, that M. Legouvé chiefly values duelling. “What would become of us wretched playwrights without the sword-duel?” he asks. “The pistol is a brutal contrivance, suitable only to dark melodramas and to dénouements.... What do you think could be done in a comedy with a man who haply had received a bullet wound? He is no longer good for anything. But if he has been wounded with a sword, he returns two minutes afterwards with his hand thrust in the folds of his waistcoat and an attempted smile on his face. The young woman says to him, ‘How pale you are!’ ‘I, mademoiselle?’ Then the end of a bandage is somehow perceived. ‘Gracious heavens! you have been fighting a duel,’ she exclaims.” M. Legouvé must now be allowed to continue in his own language: “Ah! l’admirable verbe que le verbe se battre! Tous les temps en sont bons. Vous vous battez? battez-vous!... Ne vous battez pas!... Et comme il va bien avec les exclamations: ‘Mon ami! par grâce! Monsieur, vous êtes un lâche!... Arthur! Arthur!... Je me jette à tes pieds!’ Speak not to me of dramatic writing without those two indispensable collaborators: love and the sword.
“Fencing interests me, moreover, simply as an observer. A fencing-school is a theatre at which as many amusing characters may be seen as on any stage. First of all there is a class of fencers who do not fence and never will. Then there are the men who fence in order to reduce their bulk; who have been told by their doctor or their wife that they are too fat, and who, after sweating like oxen, blowing like seals, steaming like boiled puddings, for a couple of hours, tell you in the calmest manner that they have been fencing.