“Stop!” he shouted, bringing his fist down on the table by his side.
Everybody turned in amazement. Lucien Lévy-Coeur met Christophe’s eyes and paled a little, and said:
“Were you speaking to me?”
“You hound! … Yes,” said Christophe.
He sprang to his feet.
“You soil and sully everything that is great in the world,” he went on furiously. “There’s the door! Get out, you cur, or I’ll fling you through the window!”
He moved towards him. The ladies moved aside screaming. There was a moment of general confusion. Christophe was surrounded at once. Lucien Lévy-Coeur had half risen to his feet: then he resumed his careless attitude in his chair. He called a servant who was passing and gave him a card: and he went on with his remarks as though nothing had happened: but his eyelids were twitching nervously, and his eyes blinked as he looked this way and that to see how people had taken it. Roussin had taken his stand in front of Christophe, and he took him by the lapel of his coat and urged him in the direction of the door. Christophe hung his head in his anger and shame, and his eyes saw nothing but the wide expanse of shirtfront, and kept on counting the diamond studs: and he could feel the big man’s breath on his cheek.
“Come, come, my dear fellow!” said Roussin. “What’s the matter with you? Where are your manners? Control yourself! Do you know where you are? Come, come, are you mad?”
“I’m damned if I ever set foot in your house again!” said Christophe, breaking free: and he reached the door.
The people prudently made way for him. In the cloakroom a servant held out a salver. It contained Lucien Lévy-Coeur’s card. He took it without understanding what it meant, and read it aloud: then, suddenly, snorting with rage, he fumbled in his pockets: mixed up with a varied assortment of things, he pulled out three or four crumpled dirty cards:
“There! There!” he said, flinging them on the salver so violently that one of them fell to the ground.
He left the house.
Olivier knew nothing about it. Christophe chose as his witnesses the first men of his acquaintance who turned up, the musical critic, Théophile Goujart, and a German, Doctor Barth, an honorary lecturer in a Swiss University, whom he had met one night in a café; he had made friends with him, though they had little in common: but they could talk to each other about Germany. After conferring with Lucien Lévy-Coeur’s witnesses, pistols were chosen. Christophe was absolutely ignorant about the use of arms, and Goujart told him it would not be a bad thing for him to go and have a few lessons: but Christophe refused, and while he was waiting for the day to come went on with his work.
But his mind was distracted. He had a fixed idea, of which he was dimly conscious, while it kept buzzing in his head like a bad dream. … “It was unpleasant, yes, very unpleasant. … What was unpleasant?—Oh! the duel tomorrow. … Just a joke! Nobody is ever hurt. … But it was possible. … Well, then, afterwards? … Afterwards, that was it, afterwards. … A cock of the finger by that swine who hates me may wipe out my life. … So be it! … —Yes, tomorrow, in a day or two, I may be lying in the loathsome soil of Paris. … —Bah! Here or anywhere, what does it matter! … Oh! Lord: I’m not going to play the coward!—No, but it would be monstrous to waste the mighty world of ideas that I feel springing to life in me for a moment’s folly. … What rot it is, these modern duels in which they try to equalize the chances of the two opponents! That’s a fine sort of equality that sets the same value on the life of a mountebank as on mine! Why don’t they let us go for each other with fists and cudgels? There’d be some pleasure in that. But this cold-blooded shooting! … And, of course, he knows how to shoot, and I have never had a pistol in my hand. … They are right: I must learn. … He’ll try to kill me. I’ll kill him.”
He went out. There was a range a few yards away from the house. Christophe asked for a pistol, and had it explained how he ought to hold it. With his first shot he almost killed his instructor: he went on with a second and a third, and fared no better: he lost patience, and went from bad to worse. A few young men were standing by watching and laughing. He paid no heed to them. With his German persistency he went on trying, and was so indifferent to their laughter and so determined to succeed that, as always happens, his blundering patience roused interest, and one of the spectators gave him advice. In spite of his usual violence he listened to everything with childlike docility; he managed to control his nerves, which were making his hand tremble: he stiffened himself and knit his brows: the sweat was pouring down his cheeks: he said not a word: but every now and then he would give way to a gust of anger, and then go on shooting. He stayed there for a couple of hours. At the end of that time he hit the bull’s-eye. Few things could have been more absorbing than the sight of such a power of will mastering an awkward and rebellious body. It inspired respect. Some of those who had
