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.

Meanwhile a similar scene was taking place in the little fourth-floor room which Mr. Bilbury occupied, and Mr. Bilbury, somewhat better acquainted with the customs of the University, dismissed his two friends with a little speech and awaited developments.

Before lunch the thing was arranged, and Mr. Newman, who was waiting in a rather hopeless way for his friends’ return, was informed at about twelve o’clock that all was settled; it was to be at the end of the week, up in Meudon, in a field which belonged to one of his friends’ uncles. “We are less likely to be disturbed there,” said the friend, “and we can carry the affair to a satisfactory finish.” Then he added: “It has a high wall all round it.”

“But,” said the other second, interrupting him, “since we have chosen pistols that will not be much good, for the report will be heard.”

“No,” said the first second in a nonchalant manner, “my uncle keeps a shooting gallery and the neighbours will think it a very ordinary sound. You had,” he explained courteously to Mr. Newman, “the choice of weapons as the insulted party, and we chose pistols of course.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Newman, who was not going to give himself away upon details of this kind.

“The other man’s seconds,” went on Mr. Newman’s friend genially, “wanted swords, but we told them that you couldn’t fence; besides which, with amateurs nothing ever happens with swords. And then,” he continued, musing, “if the other man is really good you’re done for, whereas with pistols there is always a chance.”

To Mr. Bilbury, equally waiting for the luncheon hour in some gloominess of soul, the same tale was told, mutatis mutandis, as they say in what is left of the classical school of the University. His adversary had chosen pistols. “And you know,” said one of his seconds to Bilbury sympathetically, “he had the right of choice; technically he was the insulted party. Besides which, pistols are always better if people don’t know each other.”

The other second agreed, and was firmly of the opinion that swords were only for intimate friends or politicians. They also mentioned the field at Meudon, but with this difference that it became in their mouths the ancient feudal property of one of their set, and they were careful to point out that the neighbours were all Royalists, devotedly attached to the family, and the safest and most silent witnesses in the world.

For the remaining days Mr. Bilbury and Mr. Newman were conducted by their separate groups of friends, the first to a shooting gallery near Vincennes, the second to a shooting gallery near St. Denis. Their experiments were thus conducted many miles apart: and it was just as well. It was remarkable what an affluence of students came as the days proceeded to see the exercise in martial sport of Mr. Newman. At first from fifty to sixty of the students with one or two of the pure mathematicians and three or four chemists comprised the audience, but before the week was over one might say that nearly all the Applied Physics and Positive Sciences of the University were crowding round Vincennes and urging Mr. Newman to accurate and yet more accurate efforts at the target. At St. Denis the number of artists increased in a similar proportion, and to these, before the week was ended, were added great crowds of poets, rhetoricians, and even mere symbolists, who wore purple ties and wigs. These also urged Mr. Bilbury to add to his proficiency; and sometimes that principal himself would shudder to see a long-haired and apparently inept person with a greenish face pick up a pistol with dreadful carelessness and put out the flame of a candle at a prodigious distance with unerring aim.

When the great day arrived two processions of such magnitude as gave proof of the latent wealth of the Republic crawled up the hill to Meudon. The occasion was far too solemn for a trot, and two men at least of those present thought several times uncomfortably about funerals. I must add in connection with funerals that a large coffin was placed upon trestles in a very conspicuous part of the field, into which each party entered by opposite wooden gates which, with the high square wall all round, quite shut out the surrounding neighbourhood. The two groups of friends (each over a hundred in number), all dressed in black and most of them in top-hats, retired to opposite corners of the field, nor was there any sign of levity in either body in spite of their youth; the four seconds, who were in frock-coats and full of an unnatural importance, deposited upon the ground between them a very valuable leather case which, when it was opened, discovered two perfectly new pistols of a length of barrel inordinate even for the use of Arabs, let alone for civilised men. These two were loaded in private and handed to either combatant, and Mr. Bilbury and Mr. Newman, having been directed each to hold the pistol pointed to the ground, were set apart by either wall while the seconds proceeded to pace the terrain. Mr. Newman remembered the cricket pitches of his dear home which perhaps he would never see again; Mr. Bilbury could think of nothing but a tune which ran in his head and caused him grave discomfort.

When the ceremony of the pacing was over the two unfortunate gentlemen were put facing each other, but twisted, with the right side of the one turning to the corresponding side of the other, so as to afford the smallest target for the deadly missiles; and then one of the seconds who held the handkerchief retired to some little distance to give the signal.

It was at this juncture, as Mr. Newman and Mr. Bilbury stood with their pistols elevated towards heaven, and waiting for the handkerchief to drop, each concentrated with a violent concentration upon the emotions of the moment, that a prodigious noise of hammering and shouting was heard at one of the doors of the enclosure, and that three gentlemen—the one wearing a large three-coloured sash, the like of which neither Mr. Bilbury nor Mr. Newman had ever seen—entered, and ordered the whole party to desist in the name of the law. So summoned, the audience with the utmost precipitation climbed over the wall, forced itself through the gates, and in every manner at its disposal vanished. And the gentleman with the tri-coloured sash, sitting down in the calmest manner upon one of the trestles and turning the coffin over by way of making a table, declared himself a public officer, and took notes of all that had occurred. It was interesting to see the businesslike way in which the seconds gave evidence, and the courtesy with which the two principals were treated as distinguished foreigners by the gentleman with the three-coloured sash. He was young, like all the rest, amazingly young for a public official of such importance, but collected and evidently most efficient. When he had done taking his notes he stood up in a half-military fashion, ranged Mr. Newman and Mr. Bilbury before him, and very rapidly read out a series of legal sentences, at the conclusion of which was a fine of one hundred francs apiece, and no more said about the matter. Mr. Bilbury and Mr. Newman were astonished that attempted homicide should cost so little in this singular country. They were still more astonished to discover that etiquette demanded a genial reconciliation of the two combatants under such circumstances, and they were positively amazed to find after that reconciliation that they were compatriots.

It was their seconds who insisted upon standing the dinner that evening. The whole incident was very happily over save for one passing qualm which Mr. Bilbury felt (and Mr. Newman also) when he saw the gentleman, whom he had last met as the tri-coloured official of the Republic, passing through the restaurant singing at the top of his voice and waving his hand genially to the group as he went out upon the boulevard.

But they remembered that in democracies the office is distinguished from the man. Luckily for democracies.