Paul buttered his bread and took a thoughtful bite. In an hour, Auguste would be expecting them. He looked around at the Café Nouvelle-Athènes where they always met on Sundays before going out to Chatou. He gripped the cool marble edge of the very table where he’d written the Mardi Gras story. That it should come to this—absurd.
“When was the last time you handled a pistol?” Pierre asked in a low voice, hunched over a letter on the table.
“In Algeria, just after the Prussian War.”
Pierre scoffed. “Nine years ago.”
“I had a quick hand.”
“Then. This is now. I tell you, you’re a fool. Can’t you pay him off?”
“I tried that last year.”
Pierre gulped his café. “This has been seething that long?” He pushed away from the table. “I won’t have this on my conscience.”
“I’m not asking for that. I’m just asking you to go with me.”
“Does Auguste know this?”
“Not exactly. I was hoping to arrive only an hour late.”
“A fine fix you’ve gotten yourself into. What’s the man’s issue?”
It was so petty he hated to recount it. “Her name is Gabrielle,” Paul said quietly. “It started with a satiric piece I wrote for Le Petit Journal about the behavior of some unnamed women at a masked ball at Mardi Gras. I described their costumes and their methods of keeping their lovers’ affections at white heat. One Robert Douvaz took offense, seeing his mistress in my remark, this Gabrielle who wore a costume similar to one I had described. I had known her, indiscreetly, on one occasion. She keeps coming back to me. I beg her not to. She comes anyway, steals some little thing from me and taunts him with false evidence of her infidelity to stir his ardor.”
“Then you’re a dupe.”
“Not by choice.” Paul ate another bite.
“So you agreed to this encounter?”
“I wouldn’t say that. It’s just better to have half a chance than be bludgeoned to death in a Montmartre alley.”
“He’s threatened that?”
“In a manner of speaking. Several times. Once when I was with Auguste.”
“Then what makes you believe he’ll actually do it?”
Paul tapped the parchment. “This is the first written cartel.”
Pierre read it again. It was written in flamboyant calligraphy.
Monsieur Paul Lhôte,
Being that you have compromised Mademoiselle Gabrielle Carême by giving her the lie in the public press, be prepared to engage in an encounter to justify your words Sunday noon in a closed field at Résidence Balfour, hard by Epinay-sur-Seine on the road to Villetaneuse.
Robert Douvaz, Appellant.
“Puh! This is ridiculous!” Pierre blurted. “That article is long forgotten.”
“It’s just an excuse. He hates me because he thinks she loves me. I don’t give a damn about her.”
“But this is the modern age, not the ancien régime.”
“Not for him. Not for plenty of men from his class.”
“Can’t you take it to the authorities and have him arrested?”
“They would never do anything about it. Currently there’s no law against dueling.” Paul chewed on his bottom lip. “It’s wearisome to second guess every man approaching on the street whenever I go out at night.”
“You’re too bloody calm about it.”
“Fascinating word choice, Pierre.” He finished the bread and sipped his café crème. “I’ve been taking exercise with a fencing master.”
“Little help that, if he chooses pistols.”
“It’s not his choice, if he goes by traditional rules.”
“And if he doesn’t, you can’t see worth a rat’s ass, and here you sit eating your breakfast just like you were going on a little boat ride.”
“Douvaz is a big target.”
Pierre glared at him. “Your humor is ill-timed.”
“I saw well enough during a sandstorm in Algeria. The Zouaves taught me some maneuvers.” Paul folded the letter and put it in his breast pocket. “What’s so awful about dying is that you don’t get to do anything anymore. No more roaming under the streets of Paris. Just lying there. I hate sleeping on my back.”
“Stop. I can’t stomach it.” Pierre bolted out the door and around the corner.
Paul lit a cigarette and waited, giving him his privacy. Sweat trickled down his neck, irritating him. He mopped it with his handkerchief, and lay his palms on the table to feel its coolness. Coolness had saved him on his third escape from the Prussian camp. And again when some urchin pulled a knife on him in the bazaar in Algiers. The greater the danger, the greater the icy calm. He wanted it to be over, regardless of the outcome, but the only way for it to be over was to go through it.
In a few minutes Pierre returned, and wiped his mouth and chin on a napkin. Paul shoved his café toward him and Pierre finished it off.
They went about the grim task of hiring a hackney coach and securing a surgeon to accompany them, and the three of them arrived at Epinay-sur-Seine, on the loop north of Argenteuil, well before noon. On a Sunday morning no shops were open. At the peal of a bell, villagers came out of the church. Pierre inquired after the road to Villetaneuse and the location of Résidence Balfour. The driver found what fit the description in open farmland far away from other dwellings, a large derelict country house overgrown with vines reaching up to the mansard roof. One of the four chimneys had been damaged and several of the upper windows were missing glass. Apparently no one lived inside. There was an unkempt orchard on one side and a broken stone path on the other that led to the rear of the house. Two closed carriages were already there.
Paul instructed the hackman to wait. He took the path. Pierre followed with the surgeon carrying a case. At the rear of the house was a crumbling stone enclosure with an iron gate. Pierre opened it for him. Inside, what had once been a garden was now grown rank and weedy except for a swath freshly scythed stretching down the length of the enclosure. The reality of it made him suddenly aware of his pulse. La piste, it was called, according to his fencing master, with tables at both ends. At one of them, Robert Douvaz stood with a number of men in top hats. Douvaz and three others approached.
“I am heartened to see you’ve arrived, and in good time,” Douvaz said.
Jesus! The bastard was going to play it for all its worth.
“I am glad to see you well,” Paul replied. Obligatory crap. He summoned the calmness that had saved him in the past, and it reassured him.
Douvaz introduced one man as Monsieur Balfour, master of the field, another, Monsieur Roy, as his parrain, or godfather, and another as a second. “The gentlemen to the rear are my witnesses and a surgeon. I see you have brought your own.”
“Have you a second?” Monsieur Roy asked.
Paul looked at Pierre whose eyes opened wider before he nodded.
“This is Monsieur Pierre Lestringuèz, who will be my second only in matters of preparation, not in execution.”
“Understood,” Roy said.
Monsieur Roy read the cartel and asked for his response.
Paul cleared his throat. “The article which you deem injurious to the mademoiselle was intended as a generality in the tone of humor, Horatian, not Juvenalian, and was not directed at her. Nevertheless, I am prepared to proceed.”
Roy folded the paper and clasped his hands behind his back. “It falls on me to state the conditions and procedure. The encounter is to be executed with pistols of equal weight, equally fitted with a hair trigger, which have recently undergone thorough and equal cleaning of parts.” He nodded to the second who retreated to the table and brought the pistols on a tray. “However,” Roy continued, “only one of them will carry a bullet.”
Pierre looked at him in astonishment.
“Combatants shall stand back to back and take ten paces,” Roy said, “then turn to face each other and fire at the call. Only one firing shall constitute the affair, regardless of outcome.”
Pierre indicated with a tilt of his head to retreat to their table. “This isn’t a duel,” Pierre said under his breath. “It’s a game of chance. You can’t be serious to go ahead.”
“It’s no worse than fifty chances in a hundred.”
“You infuriate me. I will not assist in this.”
“Tell them we demand the right to choose a different weapon. It’s custom that the challenged has the right to choose.”
“It’s a farce, and you know it. You’re a fool if you let it go further.”
“Do what I say.”
Paul and Pierre approached the other men in the center of the field.
“Your proposal, and it is only a proposal, is highly irregular,” Pierre said. “To be an honorable duel and hold any meaning in society, both parties must be equally armed. We demand our right as the challenged to the choice of weapon, as is customary.”
“You have no parrain,” Roy said. “If you had, he could negotiate. Negotiation is not the role of a second.”
Pierre turned to him and murmured, “How about Raoul?”
Paul nodded.
“Hold off. I will find a parrain,” Pierre said.
“We will give you one hour.”
“I need two. Our godfather will be the honorable Baron Raoul Barbier, ancien Capitaine de la Cavalerie de France.”
Roy and Douvaz exchanged a grave look. “One hour and a half, with five minutes’ grace period,” Roy said.
Paul and Pierre clasped hands and Pierre ran out of the closed field, yelling at the hackman to get in.