CHAPTER XXXVII

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FENCING SCHOOLS.

Fencing in France--A National Art--Some Extracts from the Writings of M. Legouvé, One of its Chief Exponents--The Old Style of Fencing and the New.

Fencing is in England the pastime of a few amateurs; in France it is a national art. An ingenious reason has been adduced by M. Legouvé why proficiency with the rapier should be acquired by everyone. “The sword,” he writes, “possesses the finest of all advantages: it is the only weapon with which you can avenge yourself without an effusion of blood. What is nobler for a man of chivalry and skill when he finds himself confronting the man who has offended him, and whom he is privileged to kill, than at once to punish this adversary and to spare his life--to disarm him, that is to say.”

It is in his character of dramatic author, however, that M. Legouvé chiefly values duelling. “What would become of us wretched playwrights without the sword-duel?” he asks. “The pistol is a brutal contrivance, suitable only to dark melodramas and to dénouements.... What do you think could be done in a comedy with a man who haply had received a bullet wound? He is no longer good for anything. But if he has been wounded with a sword, he returns two minutes afterwards with his hand thrust in the folds of his waistcoat and an attempted smile on his face. The young woman says to him, ‘How pale you are!’ ‘I, mademoiselle?’ Then the end of a bandage is somehow perceived. ‘Gracious heavens! you have been fighting a duel,’ she exclaims.” M. Legouvé must now be allowed to continue in his own language: “Ah! l’admirable verbe que le verbe _se battre_! Tous les temps en sont bons. _Vous vous battez? battez-vous!... Ne vous battez pas!..._ Et comme il va bien avec les exclamations: ‘_Mon ami! par grâce! Monsieur, vous êtes un lâche!... Arthur! Arthur!... Je me jette à tes pieds!_’ Speak not to me of dramatic writing without those two indispensable collaborators: love and the sword.

“Fencing interests me, moreover, simply as an observer. A fencing-school is a theatre at which as many amusing characters may be seen as on any stage. First of all there is a class of fencers who do not fence and never will. Then there are the men who fence in order to reduce their bulk; who have been told by their doctor or their wife that they are too fat, and who, after sweating like oxen, blowing like seals, steaming like boiled puddings, for a couple of hours, tell you in the calmest manner that they have been fencing.

“Then there are the fencing-masters, or professors of fencing, as they prefer to be called. They are generally gay, good-natured, well-meaning fellows, devoted body and soul to their pupils, especially to those pupils who have done them the honour to kill someone in mortal combat. Their weak point is said to be veracity; not on all occasions, but whenever they have the foil in hand. “I have never,” says M. Legouvé, “met a single fencer who would not--say once every year--deny that he had been touched when the hit was palpable. It is so easy to say ‘I did not feel it,’ and a hit not recognised does not count. Ah, if we dramatists could only annul hisses by saying: ‘I did not hear them!’

“My first professor,” continues M. Legouvé, “was an old master known as Père Dularviez. He had a daughter of whom he was exceedingly proud. She was employed in a milliner’s shop, which caused her father some uneasiness as to her possible conduct. There was nothing to justify his uneasiness, but he was uneasy. At last, unable to rest, he wrapped himself up in a cloak and took up his position at the corner of the Rue Traversière, close to the Rue Saint-Honoré, where his daughter worked. ‘You may imagine,’ he said to us, ‘how my heart beat when I saw her appear. I approached her, and averting my face, whispered in her ear a graceful little compliment which I had invented for the occasion. O joy! she turned round and administered to me with all her might a box on the ear. I guarded myself _en tierce_ and said: ‘My child, you are truly virtuous.’

“Fencing has, moreover, its utilitarian value. It teaches you to judge men. With the foil in hand no dissimulation is possible. After five minutes of foil-play the false varnish of mundane hypocrisy falls and trickles away with the perspiration: instead of the polished man of the world, with yellow gloves and conventional phrases, you have before you the actual man, a calculator or a blunderer, weak or firm, wily or ingenuous, sincere or treacherous.... One day I derived a great advantage. I was crossing foils with a large broker in brandies, rums, and champagnes. Before the passage of arms he had offered me his services in regard to a supply of liquors, and I had almost accepted.... The fencing at an end, I went to the proprietor and said: ‘I shall buy no champagne of that man.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘His wine must be adulterated--he denies every hit.’

“Apply my principle, and you will find it profitable. Some of you are already married. One day you will have daughters to marry. Well, if a suitor presents himself, do not waste time in collecting particulars which are too often false. Say simply to your future son-in-law: ‘Will you have a turn with the foils?’ At the end of a quarter of an hour you will know more about his character than after six weeks of investigations.

“Finally, I like fencing because you cannot learn it. It does, indeed, demand practice, and long practice; but that is not sufficient, it must be your vocation: you must be born a fencer, just as you must be born an artist. And then, when the apprenticeship has been served, what pleasure is enjoyed! I doubt whether there is in external life a single act in which a man feels himself to live more fully than in a vigorous assault.

“Look at the fencer in action. Each member, each muscle is stretched, and each for a different purpose. Whilst the hand glances rapidly and lightly, always tending forwards, the body holds itself back, and the legs, vigorously contracted like a spring, await, for their extension, the signal to be given by the arm as it prepares to make its sudden thrust. The whole of the members are like so many obedient soldiers to whom the general says: ‘March’--‘Halt’--‘Double.’ The general is the head, that head which, at once inspired and calculating as though on a real field of battle, detects at a glance the faults of the enemy, lays traps for him and compels him to fall into them, simulates a retreat in order to give him confidence, and returns suddenly upon him with a frightful assault....

“And to think that this art, complex as it is, in which the whole of the body is engaged, should really be concentrated between the end of the forefinger and the thumb. For there it all is: there resides the delicate and masterly faculty which alone constitutes the superior fencer--tact. Is it not wonderful to see how much sensibility and life flows between these two digits? They tremble, they palpitate beneath the pressure of the foil in contact with their own, as if an electric current communicated to them all its movements. For them the aid of sight is not necessary, for they do more than see the hostile sword; they feel it, they could follow it with their eyes bandaged; and if you add to these magnificent delights of the sense of touch the powerful circulation of the blood which runs in great waves through the veins, the beating heart, the boiling head, the throbbing arteries, the heaving breast, the opening pores; if you join, moreover, to this the delight of feeling your power and your suppleness increase tenfold; if you think, above all, of the ardent joy and bitter grief of self-love, of the pleasure of beating and the vexation of being beaten, and of the thousand vicissitudes of a struggle which terminates and begins again at each fresh thrust--you will understand that there is in the exercise of this art a veritable intoxication, of which the passion for gambling can alone give an idea. It is play without vice and with health superadded.”

M. Legouvé, who, besides being an admirable writer, possesses no superficial knowledge of fencing, next proceeds to a few detailed observations on the art of the foil and its professors. We can hardly do better than preserve his own words. “Fencing,” he says, “has undergone during the last half-century the same revolution as poetry, music, and painting. It has had its romantic period and its contending schools.

“The distinguishing characteristics of the old school were rigidity, grace, and a certain academic elegance. The words themselves express the thing. To practise fencing was to ‘go to the Academy.’ A fencer of the old school could not run to the attack, nor suddenly break off. He neither bent down nor sprang forward, but under all circumstances maintained, more or less, the same attitude. Fencing was in those days, above all things, an art; which, like every art, had the beautiful for aim.

“Very different was the system of the new school. To make hits was its one object. The means were of no importance, provided the result could be obtained. Fencing was now more a combat than an art; its programme included everything, even the ugly. Fencers would now lie on the ground, would avoid a thrust by ducking their head, aim below the belt, and reduce all the qualities of the fencer to one only: rapidity.

“Gomard and Charlemagne were the two last representatives of the old school: Roussel and Lozes the two first of the new one. I have had the honour, in my youth, of fencing with all four; and I do not hesitate to say that, in my opinion, while fully recognising the incomparable quickness of Lozes, the superiority rested altogether with the representatives of the old school. Fencing ran the risk not of being renewed, like poetry, in another form, but of being lost altogether, at least as an art. Then came forward a young man who combined in himself the opposite qualities of the two schools. Every lover of fencing will understand that I am referring to Bertrand. As rapid as Lozes and as regular as Gomard, he borrowed from romanticism its audacity, its inspiration, its occasional rashness, and preserved at the same time the elegance of bearing, the severity of attitude, the caution and the science of the classical school. He may fairly be said, in company with Cordelois and Pons the elder, to have saved the art of fencing. He is an exceptional fencer among exceptional fencers. If I may be allowed to use the expression, there is genius in his art. The fencing-masters who came next were the products, somewhat mixed, of the three schools; the four professors who figure in the first rank being MM. Robert the elder, Gâtechair, Mimiague, and Pons the younger. Robert has a quickness of hand, an accuracy of attitude, and a rapidity of reply which recalls Bertrand. Gâtechair is the most academic of the masters of the present day. There is, however, something a little theatrical in his elegance and in his imposing carriage.

“Mimiague is supple, insinuating, adroit, sure to profit by every opportunity. There is a sort of cajolery in his play. If you ask who is the best of these four professors, I shall recommend you to apply the test of Themistocles. Bring together the principal fencing-masters of Paris, and ask them to write on a slip of paper the names of the two best fencers in Paris. Each of them will give the first vote to himself; but Robert will have all the second votes: from which I conclude that he deserves the first.”

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