Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

“Then there are the fencing-masters, or professors of fencing, as they prefer to be called. They are generally gay, good-natured, well-meaning fellows, devoted body and soul to their pupils, especially to those pupils who have done them the honour to kill someone in mortal combat. Their weak point is said to be veracity; not on all occasions, but whenever they have the foil in hand. “I have never,” says M. Legouvé, “met a single fencer who would not—say once every year—deny that he had been touched when the hit was palpable. It is so easy to say ‘I did not feel it,’ and a hit not recognised does not count. Ah, if we dramatists could only annul hisses by saying: ‘I did not hear them!’

“My first professor,” continues M. Legouvé, “was an old master known as Père Dularviez. He had a daughter of whom he was exceedingly proud. She was employed in a milliner’s shop, which caused her father some uneasiness as to her possible conduct. There was nothing to justify his uneasiness, but he was uneasy. At last, unable to rest, he wrapped himself up in a cloak and took up his position at the corner of the Rue Traversière, close to the Rue Saint-Honoré, where his daughter worked. ‘You may imagine,’ he said to us, ‘how my heart beat when I saw her appear. I approached her, and averting my face, whispered in her ear a graceful little compliment which I had invented for the occasion. O joy! she turned round and administered to me with all her might a box on the ear. I guarded myself en tierce and said: ‘My child, you are truly virtuous.’

“Fencing has, moreover, its utilitarian value. It teaches you to judge men. With the foil in hand no dissimulation is possible. After five minutes of foil-play the false varnish of mundane[{258}] hypocrisy falls and trickles away with the perspiration: instead of the polished man of the world, with yellow gloves and conventional phrases, you have before you the actual man, a calculator or a blunderer, weak or firm, wily or ingenuous, sincere or treacherous.... One day I derived a great advantage. I was crossing foils with a large broker in brandies, rums, and champagnes. Before the passage of arms he had offered me his services in regard to a supply of liquors, and I had almost accepted.... The fencing at an end, I went to the proprietor and said: ‘I shall buy no champagne of that man.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘His wine must be adulterated—he denies every hit.’

“Apply my principle, and you will find it profitable. Some of you are already married. One day you will have daughters to marry. Well, if a suitor presents himself, do not waste time in collecting particulars which are too often false. Say simply to your future son-in-law: ‘Will you have a turn with the foils?’ At the end of a quarter of an hour you will know more about his character than after six weeks of investigations.

“Finally, I like fencing because you cannot learn it. It does, indeed, demand practice, and long practice; but that is not sufficient, it must be your vocation: you must be born a fencer, just as you must be born an artist. And then, when the apprenticeship has been served, what pleasure is enjoyed! I doubt whether there is in external life a single act in which a man feels himself to live more fully than in a vigorous assault.

“Look at the fencer in action. Each member, each muscle is stretched, and each for a different purpose. Whilst the hand glances rapidly and lightly, always tending forwards, the body holds itself back, and the legs, vigorously contracted like a spring, await, for their extension, the signal to be given by the arm as it prepares to make its sudden thrust. The whole of the members are like so many obedient soldiers to whom the general says: ‘March’—‘Halt’—‘Double.’ The general is the head, that head which, at once inspired and calculating as though on a real field of battle, detects at a glance the faults of the enemy, lays traps for him and compels him to fall into them, simulates a retreat in order to give him confidence, and returns suddenly upon him with a frightful assault....

“And to think that this art, complex as it is, in which the whole of the body is engaged, should really be concentrated between the end of the forefinger and the thumb. For there it all is: there resides the delicate and masterly faculty which alone constitutes the superior fencer—tact. Is it not wonderful to see how much sensibility and life flows between these two digits? They tremble, they palpitate beneath the pressure of the foil in contact with their own, as if an electric current communicated to them all its movements. For them the aid of sight is not necessary, for they do more than see the hostile sword; they feel it, they could follow it with their eyes bandaged; and if you add to these magnificent delights of the sense of touch the powerful circulation of the blood which runs in great waves through the veins, the beating heart, the boiling head, the throbbing arteries, the heaving breast, the opening pores; if you join, moreover, to this the delight of feeling your power and your suppleness increase tenfold; if you think, above all, of the ardent joy and bitter grief of self-love, of the pleasure of beating and the vexation of being beaten, and of the thousand vicissitudes of a struggle which terminates and begins again at each fresh thrust—you will understand that there is in the exercise of this art a veritable intoxication, of which the passion for gambling can alone give an idea. It is play without vice and with health superadded.”

M. Legouvé, who, besides being an admirable writer, possesses no superficial knowledge of fencing, next proceeds to a few detailed observations on the art of the foil and its professors. We can hardly do better than preserve his own words. “Fencing,” he says, “has undergone during the last half-century the same revolution as poetry, music, and painting. It has had its romantic period and its contending schools.

“The distinguishing characteristics of the old school were rigidity, grace, and a certain academic elegance. The words themselves express the thing. To practise fencing was to ‘go to the Academy.’ A fencer of the old school could not run to the attack, nor suddenly break off. He neither bent down nor sprang forward, but under all circumstances maintained, more or less, the same attitude. Fencing was in those days, above all things, an art; which, like every art, had the beautiful for aim.

“Very different was the system of the new school. To make hits was its one object. The means were of no importance, provided the result could be obtained. Fencing was now more a combat than an art; its programme[{259}] included everything, even the ugly. Fencers would now lie on the ground, would avoid a thrust by ducking their head, aim below the belt, and reduce all the qualities of the fencer to one only: rapidity.