1825 It’s not an easy statistic to gather but, given the nature of his plots (musketeers and Counts of Monte Cristo), no novelist features more duels in his fiction, nor features them more climactically, than Alexandre Dumas (père).
The twenty-year-old Dumas came to Paris with the restoration of the monarchy in 1822. It would be seven years before he made his name as a writer (of plays, initially), and twenty years before, with the D’Artagnan romances, he would become the most popular writer of fiction in France – specialising in the clash of swords (although the plot of The Three Musketeers hinges, initially, on duels being banned). Initially he worked at the Palais Royal, in the office of the Duc D’Orléans.
In his memoirs Dumas recalls fighting a duel. It began over a game of billiards when one of the company chose to be sarcastic about the dandyish Dumas’s dress. The affair was arranged by the seconds, with the normal rituals, for 5 January – traditionally they were fought at dawn. Dumas was the challenger.
Pistols were initially the chosen weapon. In the event it was changed to swords. The site was a snow-swept quarry. Dumas’s opponent slept in, however, and the date was pushed back to the sixth and the place changed to Montmartre. The event quickly descended into farce as quarry workers (who left their beds earlier than the high-born duellists) gathered to watch the fun and Dumas’s sword proved, on the routine measurement of rapiers, to be shorter than his adversary’s. Nor were things helped by Dumas’s adversary experiencing difficulty (having forgotten his braces) in keeping his trousers up. There was a serious likelihood of his expiring in his underpants. Both of them were somewhat less skilled in swordplay than Edmond Dantès.
Honour was satisfied when Dumas drew blood by nicking his opponent in the shoulder. Duels were always more glamorous in Dumas’s later fiction and doubly so in the innumerable stage and movie versions of it.