Fanchea, delighted, hastened with three of her
virgins to the coast, and, flinging her cloak
on the waves, was conveyed on it, as on a raft,
to Britain. But Enda was now an abbot, and
his nature had greatly changed; so when
Fanchea, with her companions, came to the
door of the monastery, he gave her to understand
that she might either see his face or hear
his voice, but that to see and hear was impossible.
She chose to hear, and a tent having
been pitched, Enda, veiling his face, conversed
with her. Thus abruptly the story comes to
an end, and so must our discourse, for it is
getting very late. Perhaps we can talk about
Ennis another time."

DUEL FIGHTING.

IN TWO CHAPTERS. FIRST CHAPTER.

MR. CARLYLE, in summing up the
characteristics of the old French noblesse, gives them
credit for having possessed one merit, such as it
was: "a perfect readiness to fight duels." The
authorities on the subject have recorded many
curious stories. We will lay the authorities
under contribution.

To begin with the time when the tide of
revolution was on the flood. A certain young
noble, M. de Servan, on taking leave of some
court ladies to attend the opening of the
States General in 1789, gallantly shook out
his white cambric handkerchief before them,
and said, "I shall bring you back half a dozen
of those troublesome Bretons' ears." His
first essay was upon M. de Hératry, whose
cheek he stroked in a playful way. On being
remonstrated with, he repeated the familiarity,
and had his foot pounded beneath the Breton's
heavy boot-heel in return. A duel ensued.
The courtiers came in coaches and chairs,
attended by servants bearing torches, to witness
the reaping of M. de Servan's first crop of ears,
instead of which they saw the unfortunate champion
of feudalism, in the course of a few minutes,
stretched dead upon the ground. Later, the
noblesse are said to have leagued together, to
get rid of the popular leaders in the National
Assembly, one by one, by fastening quarrels
upon them, and by systematically silencing their
tongues and their pens by the skilful application
of the requisite number of inches of cold steel.
This was, however, too slow a method for the
royalist Faussigny, who boldly proclaimed in
the Assembly, that there was but one way of
dealing with the ultra-patriotic party: "to fall
sword in hand on these gentry there," meaning
the members on the extreme left. Mirabeau, as
has often been recorded, refused to fight until
after the constitution was made, and used to
content himself with observing to his challengers,
"Monsieur, I have put your name down
on my list; but I warn you that it is a long
one, and that I grant no preferences." The
Grange Batelière section prayed the Assembly
to declare, that whoever sent or accepted a
challenge, should be excluded from all future civil
and military employment; and one of the Paris
journals published the proposed form of a decree,
according to the terms of which every member of
the Assembly fighting a duel was to be excluded
from the Assembly; and any speeches he might
have made were to be removed from its records,
and publicly burnt." A writer in the Observateur
went so far as to demand, that all duellists should
be branded on the forehead with the letter A
(assassin). Patriots who refused to fight duels
had their names printed in large type in the
patriot journals; and the company of
chasseurs of the battalion of Sainte Marguerite
passed a resolution to the effect that "they
would present themselves in turn at the sittings
of the National Assembly, and would regard as
personal all quarrels provoked with patriot
deputies, whom they would defend to their last
drop of blood." Citizen Boyer, however, went
beyond this; he was prepared, Atlas like, to
take the burden of all these quarrels on his own
particular shoulders, and actually opened a
bureau on the Passage du Bois de Boulogne,
Faubourg Saint Denis, where the preliminaries
of these affairs might be arranged, "and whence
he wrote to the journals that he had made a
vow to defend the deputies against their enemies.
"I swear," said he, "that neither time
nor space shall shield from my just vengeance
the man who has wounded a deputy. I possess
arms that the hands of patriotism have fabricated
for me. Every kind of weapon is familiar to
me; I give the preference to none. All satisfy
me, provided the result be death." After
publishing this pot-valiant and sanguinary declaration,
he presented himself at M. de Sainte
Luce's, who had an affair in progress with
young M. de Rochambeau, whereupon this
nobleman put the bragging condottiere out at
the door. In nowise discouraged by this insult,
citizen Boyer formed a school, and enlisted a
battalion of fifty spadassinicides (bully killers),
and wrote again to the newspapers, renewing
his professions of courage, and his threats of
vengeance.

While the duels between the royalists and
patriots were at their height, Gervais, the mâitre
d'armes of Viscount de Mirabeau (Barrel Mirabeau
as he was called by reason of his bulk
and his powers of imbibition) used to pass his
nights in training young aristocrats to spit
patriot orators in the Bois de Boulogne, on the
coming morning.

At the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815,
scarcely a day went by without its hostile meeting
in Paris, chiefly between the officers of
Napoleon's army and those of Louis the
Eighteenth's Body Guard, but also between the
former and the various English, Prussian,
Russian, and Austrian officers in the French
capital. The Bonapartist officers would repair
to the Café Foy, the rendezvous of Prussian
military men for the sole purpose of picking
quarrels with them; and, if the opportunity
presented itself, they would insult English officers
with equal readiness. Captain Gronow,
known by his lively "reminiscences," who