On Everything

by Hilaire Belloc

The Duel

IN the year 1895 of blessed memory there was living in the town of Paris at the expense of his parents a young English gentleman of the name of Bilbury; at least, if that were not his name his name was so nearly that that it doesn’t matter. He spoke French very well, and had for his age (which was twenty-four) a very good working acquaintance with French customs. He was popular among the students with whom he associated, and it was his especial desire not to seem too much of a foreigner on the various occasions when French life contrasts somewhat with that of this island. It was something of a little mania of his, for though he was patriotic to a degree when English history or English habits were challenged, yet it made him intolerably nervous to feel exceptional or eccentric in the town where he lived. It was upon this account that he fought a duel.

There happened to be resident in the town of Paris at the same time another gentleman, whose name was Newman; he also was young, he also was English, but whereas Mr. Bilbury was by genius a painter, Mr. Newman was by vocation an engineer. And while Mr. Bilbury would spend hours in the studio of a master whom (in common with the other students) he despised, Mr. Newman was continually occupied in playing billiards with his fellow students of engineering in the University. And while Mr. Bilbury was spending quite twelve hours a day in finding out how to make a picture look like a thing if you stood a long way off from it (which is the end and object of his school in Paris), Mr. Newman had already acquired the art of making a billiard ball come right back again towards the cue after it had struck its neighbour. Mr. Bilbury had learned how to sing in chorus with the other students songs relating in no way to pictorial excellence; Mr. Newman had learned to sing those songs peculiar to students of engineering, but relating in no way to applied physics. In a word, these two young gentlemen had never met.

But one day Mr. Bilbury, going arm-in-arm with three friends towards the river, met upon the pavement of the Rue Bonaparte Mr. Newman in much the same posture, but accompanied by a rather larger bodyguard. It would have been astonishing to anyone little acquainted with the temper of students in the University, and indeed it was astonishing both to Mr. Newman and to Mr. Bilbury, though they had now for some months been acquainted with the inhabitants of that strange corner of the universe, to see how this trifling incident provoked an altercation which in its turn degenerated into a vulgar quarrel. Each party refused to give way to the other, and the members of each began comparing the members of the other to animals of every kind such as the pig, the cow, and even certain denizens of the deep. In the midst of the hubbub Mr. Bilbury, not to be outdone in the racy vigour of youth, shouted at Mr. Newman (who for all he knew might have been a Russian revolutionary or a man from St. Cyr) an epithet which he had come across in the contemporary literature of the capital, and which he imagined to be of common exchange among the merry souls of the University. To his surprise—nay, to his alarm—a dead silence followed the use of this very humble and ordinary word. Mr. Newman, to whom it was addressed, was not indeed ignorant of its meaning (for it meant nothing in particular and was offensive), but was astonished at the gravity of those round him when the little epithet had been uttered. With a sense of surprise now far exceeding that of Mr. Bilbury he saw his companions draw themselves up stiffly, take off their eccentric felt hats with large sweeping gestures, and march him off as stiff as pokers, leaving the Bilbury group solemn with the solemnity of men who have a duty to perform.

That duty was very quickly accomplished. The eldest and most responsible of the three friends told Bilbury very gently but very firmly that there could be no issue but one to the scene which had just passed.

“I am not blaming you, my dear John,” he said kindly (Mr. Bilbury’s name was John), “but you know there can be only one issue.”

Meanwhile Mr. Newman’s friends, after maintaining their strict and haughty parade almost the whole length of the Rue Bonaparte, broke silence together, and said: “It is shameful, and you will not tolerate it!” To which Mr. Newman replied by an assurance that he would in no way fall beneath the dignity of the situation.

More than this neither Mr. Bilbury nor Mr. Newman knew, but they both went to bed that night much later than either intended, and each felt in himself a something of what Ruth felt when she stood among the alien corn, or words to that effect.

And next morning each of them woke with the knowledge that he had some terrible business on hand with some ass of a foreigner who had got excited, or, to be more accurate, had suddenly stopped being excited for wholly incomprehensible reasons at a particular moment in a lively conversation. Both Mr. Newman and Mr. Bilbury were, I say, in this mood when there entered to Mr. Newman in his room in the Rue des Ecoles (which he could ill afford) two of his friends of the night before, who said to him very simply and rapidly that it would be better for them to act as his seconds as the others had chosen them as most fitted. To this Mr. Newman murmured his adhesion, and was about to ask anxiously whether he would soon see them again, when, with a solemnity quite out of keeping with their usual good-fellowship, they bowed in a ritual manner and disappeared.