who prefers to study men rather than stone,
and qualities rather than peristyles, than
the Paris fencing schools. Here you meet
the men of fashion, the men of the
boulevards, downy-lipped aspirants for army
commissions, students from the Latin
quarter, but above all, ambitious journalists.
Access as a spectator is easily obtained,
and you may go far and hunt a great deal
before finding an exhibition which lets you
so far into French characteristics. There
are many fencing schools of all grades of
fame, price, and accommodation. There are
little rooms in darksome quarters where
you may learn, after a fashion, for a trifling
fee ; and there are spacious, elegant saloons,
kept by celebrated masters of the art,
where the prices are relatively as high as
are those of Victor Hugo for his novels,
or of Gustave Doré for his illustrations.
These saloons are decorated in a fashion
appropriate to their use. They have suits
of armour along the walls, elaborate collections
of rapiers, swords, and sabres crossed
athwart each other, pictures of tournaments,
duels, and battles. But curious above all
are the specimens of human nature which
you see there. A fencing saloon is a little
theatre where there are quite as many
originals as in the best of Sardon's comedies.
The maîtres d'armes, the awe of
youthful beginners, and the admiration of
the aptest of their scholars, betray in every
look and motion their pride and conceit in
their art, and seem to exhibit a sort of
independence and bluffness arising from a
consciousness that they can maintain their
ground against all comers. They are the
champion knights of the modern chivalry,
and stride about their domain with much
the same hauteur of physical prowess which
the knights of old used to show. Still,
their amour-propre is not unamiable ; they
are burly, gay, " good fellows and brave
fellows," devoted heart and soul to their
pupils, and especially proud of those who
have pinked their man in the wood of
Vincennes. They are loquacious, and if you
happen to go in when half-a-dozen of the
scholars are preparing for their lesson, you
will hear the maître regaling them with
wonderful stories, in which he is always
the hero ; never having, if you will believe
him, been hit with rapier or foil. It is odd
to watch the countenances of the pupils as
they parry and thrust with monsieur the
maître.

The best masters use the foils without
buttons after the pupil has reached a
certain stage of proficiency. Then it is that
you may judge of the real quality and
"grit" of the man. Pretending is out of
the question when one has the naked foil
in his hand. Hypocrisy abandons the
coolest. The polite and polished man of
the world dissolves before your eyes into
the true man of nature, cool or rash, timid
or bold, cunning or frank, sincere or subtle.
The academician to whom I have referred,
relates that one day he fenced with what
he regarded as good results to himself. He
tells us that he had a bout with a very
extensive agent of wines and liqueurs, who,
previous to the sport, had offered to furnish
him with some excellent wine, which our
academician had nearly accepted. The
fencing over, the narrator went to the
maître, and said to him, " I will buy no
champagne of this gentleman." " Why?"
"His wine must be adulterated; he denies
that he was struck!" He applies the
principle to prospective sons-in-law. " When
a pretender to your daughter's hand
presents himself, don't waste your time informing
yourself of him, information of this sort
being often unreliable; say simply to your
future son-in-law, ' Will you have a bout?'
At the end of a quarter of an hour you will
know more of his character than after six
weeks of investigation." The art of fencing,
as it is in France, has its antagonistic
schools, as well as the arts of painting and
letters. Those who practise the art as it
was practised half a century ago are called
the "old school;" those who follow the
system of the " reformers" of fencing,
Roussel and Lozés, pride themselves on
being the "new school." The admirers of
the art imagine that they see in it a revival
or reform analogous to that which took
place at about the same period in music,
painting, and literature. What Rossini
and Meyerbeer were in opera, Hugo and
St. Beuve in letters, and De la Roche and
his contemporaries in painting, Roussel
and Lozés were in fencing—founders of a
new era. Fencing has had, says a French
writer, "its romanticism and its contests
of schools." The "old school" of fencing
was in harmony with the old manners, the
old order of society and régime. Elegance
and grace were its requirements and
characteristics. It was an ornamental and
polite art. Did your life hang in the
balance, you must not be awkward.

To be " pinked" was a slight offence
compared to falling out of the line of harmony.
A blunder was literally worse than death.
The very language of the old fencing
schools hinted their ideal to be classical
and " academic." When one went to take
lessons, he went to the " academy." A