“Again we ranged ourselves; again we grasped our rapiers, saluted, and stood ready for the game to begin. The marquis’s coolness had somewhat forsaken him. The finest equanimity is ruffled by a buffet in the face; one cannot command calm at will. His friends said afterwards that he showed extraordinary self-control, but I should rather have described it as extraordinary uneasiness. No duellist cares for a berserker foe. De Gonse was, moreover, of a superstitious fancy. There are such things, besides, as presentiments; I think he must have had one then. God knows, perhaps he was struggling with remorse. The handkerchief fell; we crossed swords, and the combat was resumed with the utmost vivacity. The air rang with the shivering steel. The doctors smoked no longer, but looked on with open mouths. A duel in grim earnest is seldom seen in France, though I venture to say there was one that morning. It lasted only a minute; we had scarcely well begun before I felt a stinging in my side, and saw, as in a dream, my enemy’s triumphant face, red with his exertions. The exasperation of that moment passes the power of words to describe. This was my revenge, this a villain’s punishment on the field of honour! He would leave it without a scratch, to be lionised in salons, to relate in boudoirs the true inwardness of the quarrel! Remember, I felt all this within the confines of a single second, as a drowning man in no more brief a space passes his entire life in review. Imagine, if you can, my rage, my uncontrollable indignation, my unbounded fury. What I did then I would do now,—by God, I would,—if need be, a dozen times! I caught his rapier in my left hand and held it in the aching wound, while with my unimpeded right I stabbed him through the body, again and again, with amazing swiftness—so that he fell pierced in six places. There was a terrible outcry; shouts of ‘Murder!’ ‘Coward!’ ‘Assassin!’ on every side looks of horror and detestation. One of the marquis’s seconds beset me like a maniac with his cane, and I believe I should have killed him too had not the old colonel run between us.
“The other second was supporting de Gonse’s head and assisting the surgeons to staunch the pouring blood. But it was labour lost; any one could see that he was doomed. From a little distance I watched them crowding about him where he lay on the grass; for I had drawn apart, sick and dizzy with my own wounds, conscious that I was now an outcast among men. At last one came towards me; it was Clut, the doctor. He said nothing, but drew me gently towards the group he had just quitted. They opened for me to pass as though I were a leper. A second later I stood beside the dying man, gazing down at his face.
“‘He wishes to shake hands with you,’ said the other doctor, solemnly, guiding the marquis’s hand upward in his own. ‘Let his death atone, he says; he wishes to part in amity.’
“I folded my arms.
“‘No, monsieur,’ I said. ‘What you ask is impossible.’ With that I walked away, not daring to look back lest I might falter in my resolution. I can say honestly that de Gonse’s death weighs on me very little; yet I would give ten years of my life to unsay those final words—to recall that last brutality. In my dreams I often see him so, holding out the hand, which I try to grasp. I hear the doctor saying, ‘He wishes to part in amity.’
“I fainted soon after leaving my opponent’s side. I lay on the ground where I fell, no one caring to come to my assistance. When consciousness returned I saw them lifting the marquis’s body into a carriage, and I needed no telling to learn that he was dead. My colonel and Van Greef assisted me into another cab, neither of them saying a word nor showing me the least compassion. I suppose I should have been thankful they did so much. Was not I accursed? Were they not involved in my dishonour? They abandoned me, wounded, faint, and parching with thirst, to find my own way to Paris. Alone? No, not altogether. On the seat beside me my colonel laid a flask of brandy and a loaded pistol. The first I drank; the revolver I pitched out of window. I never thought to kill myself. For cheating at cards, for several varieties of dishonour, yes. But not for what I had done—never in all the world. My conscience was as undisturbed as that of a little child; excepting always that—why had I not taken his hand!
“I was arrested, of course, and tried—tried for murder. You see, there were too many in the secret for it to be long kept. It was a cause célèbre, attracting universal attention. The quarrel concerned the Spanish Succession; as to that they could not shake me. There were many surmises, many suspicions, but no one stumbled on the truth. To a single man only was it told—Maître Le Roux, my counsel. Him I had to tell, for at first he would not take up my case at all. There was a great popular outcry against me, the army furious and ashamed, the bourgeoisie in hysterics. I was condemned; sentenced to death; reprieved at the particular intercession of the Marquise de Gonse, the dead man’s mother, who threw herself on her knees before the Chief Executive—reprieved to transportation for life!
“You will be surprised I mention not my mother. Ah, mademoiselle, there are some things which will not permit themselves to be told—even to you. She went mad. She died. My military degradation is another of those things unspeakable. The epaulets were torn from my shoulders, the galons from my sleeves, my sword broken in two; all this in public before my regiment in hollow square. Picture for yourself, on every side, those walls of faces, scarcely one not familiar; my colonel, choking on his charger, the agitated master of ceremonies; my former friends and comrades trying not to meet my eye; in the ranks many of my own troopers crying, and the officers swearing at them below their breath. My God, it was another Calvary!
“At Havre they kept me long in prison, waiting for the transport to carry me to New Caledonia. It was there I heard of my sister’s death, the news being brought to me by a young French lady, a friend of Berthe’s. My sister had poisoned herself, appalled at what she had done. There was no scandal, however, no sensational inquiry. She was too clever for that, too scientific; it was by no vulgar means that she sought her end. Assembling her friends, she bade them good-bye in turn, and divided among them her little property, her money, jewels, and clothes. She died in the typhus hospital to which she had volunteered her services—a victim to her own imprudence, said the doctors; a martyr to duty, proclaimed the world. She was accorded the honour of a municipal funeral (though her actual body was thrown into a pit of lime): the maire and council in carriages, the charity children on foot, the pompiers with their engine, a battalion of the National Guard, and the band of the Ninth Marine Infantry! What mockery! What horror!
“Here in New Caledonia I looked forward to endure frightful sufferings, to be herded with the dregs of mankind in a squalor unspeakable. But, on the contrary, I was received everywhere with kindness. The rigours of imprisonment were relieved by countless exemptions. I found, as I had read before in books, that the sight of a great gentleman in misfortune is one very moving to common minds; and if he bears his sorrows with manly fortitude and dignity, he need not fear for friends. To my jailers I was invariably ‘Monsieur’; they apologised for intruding on my privacy, for setting me the daily task; they would have looked the other way had I been backward or disinclined. I was neither, for I was not only ready to conform to the regulations, but something within me revolted at being unduly favoured.