Du Vighan received three severe wounds
in his side. Nothing daunted, however,
he scaled the walls of Montmartre that
very night; but to no purpose; the princess
was under the safe keeping of warders and
bolts, and poor Du Vighan had to remain in
the cold cloisters all night alone. His wounds
broke out into a fearful haemorrhage: and when
the morning came, the nuns found the hapless
youth lying dead on the stone pavement.

"La botte de Saint Evremont," was a pass
invented by that most noted duellist. He
and Saint Foix were rivals in fame, and both
were witty, insolent, good-natured, and
capricious. Saint Foix had a duel with a gentleman,
whom he saw at the Café Procope,
eating a bavaroise. "A confounded bad
dinner for a gentleman," said Saint Foix.
The stranger called him out, and wounded
him. "Sir," said Saint Foix, "bandaging
his wound, '' if you had killed me I should
still have said that a bavaroise is a confounded
bad dinner for a gentleman."

In seventeen hundred and seventy-eight
the Comte d'Artois (afterwards Charles the
Ninth) fought with the Prince de Condé
(Duc de Bourbon), for having struck Madame
la Duchesse de Bourbonne; who, at a masked
ball, annoyed Madame de Carillac, the chère
amie of D'Artois,—formerly holding the
same position with the Duc de Bourbon; the
duchess being also in love with the future
monarch. It was a bloodless duel, where,
after a vast deal of parade, the offended
parties embraced. The Chevalier d'Eon
lived, too, at this period;—that strange
mythic being, the expert swordsman, the
clever diplomatist, the man in woman's
clothes, or the woman in man's clothes—no
one rightly knew which. Certain it is that
D'Eon was made to wear woman's clothes,
whatever the reason may have been—
whether De Guerchy's honour, whom he
had insulted, or because of D'Aiguillon's
spite, or for state reasons, or haply for
natural ones—whatever may have been the
cause, it is historically true that the Chevalier
d'Eon dressed as a woman, or that a woman
assumed the name, and habits, and costume of
a man. D'Eon's noted affair was with the
Comte de Guerchy, whom he struck in the
face,—the Comte being the ambassador in
London, to whose ambassade D'Eon was
attached. There was no duel, but the young
Comte de Guerchy, after his father's death,
sought to meet D'Eon; whereon his mother,
dreading a meeting with the mature duellist
for her inexperienced son, petitioned for a
renewal of the order for the chevalier to wear
female apparel again; and once more D'Eou
was plunged into petticoats and head-dresses.

The Marquis de Tenteniac once challenged
the whole pit of a theatre; and Ney would
have fought again, as many times before, the
public battles of his regiment, had not the
colonel seized him by his coat-tails, and
dragged him thus, backward, to the blackhole.
However, he met his antagonist afterwards,
— the fencing master of a chasseur
regiment,—and wounded him in the sword-arm,
crippling him for life. When Ney's fortunes
rose, he sought him out and pensioned him.
A young officer insulted a colonel of the
French Guards, who declared himself against
duelling; calling him a coward, and striking
him on the face. The colonel met him the
next day, with a large piece of court-plaister
on the cheek which had been struck. They
fought; and the young man was wounded
in the sword-arm. The colonel bowed, put
up his weapon, took off the plaister, and cut
off one side of it. When the wound was healed,
the colonel called him out again, and again
wounded him, cutting off another piece of his
plaister. Again, and again, and again, this
happened, the colonel always wounding the
poor youth, and always cutting off a piece of
his plaister, until it was reduced to the size
of a shilling. And then they met for the
last time;—the colonel ran him through, and
laid him dead at his feet, coolly taking off
all that was left of the plaister, and laying
it on the ground beside the dead body.

In seventeen hundred and eighty-five, the
Comte de Gersdorff challenged M. le Favre
by the public prints; using strong language
and offering him a hundred louis d'or for his
travelling expenses, if he would but go and
meet him. Le Favre accepted the challenge,
but not the louis d'or; and the field was set.
They stood at twenty-five paces, and fired
once; wide of the mark on both sides. Their
seconds then came forward and complimented
them on their courage; the principals
embraced, forgave, and were reconciled. There
was another and a later French duel, to the
full as ridiculous as this. In eighteen
hundred and twenty-six, the Marquis de Livron
and M. du Trone met in the forest of Senart,
near the chateau of Madame de Cayla. Du
Trone, a young advocate, came dressed in the
costume of a modern Greek, and the duel
took place on horseback; the weapons
sabres; the seconds three a side. At the
first onset, the marquis was dismounted, and
both were slightly wounded; but, the
gendarmes came and put a stop to the mock
heroics of these two simpletons before any
real damage was done; and the romantic
youths were marched off from the gaze of the
one hundred and fifty spectators, whom the
folly of their raree-show had drawn together.
The fiasco of that honourable encounter was
sublime; almost as sublime as the duels
between women which flutter through the
sterner records crowding the French annals.

And now duels come so thick and fast, that
we cannot even enumerate them. Literary
men, artists, friends, strangers, and enemies
all seem to spend their lives and lose them
in fighting duels for every conceivable
and inconceivable cause. Fayau killed Saint
Marcellin, his former friend, for a mere literary
discussion; Saint Aulaire was killed