“I thank you, messieurs,” rejoined Deroulede.  “The whole thing is a farce, and that young man is a fool; but I have been in the wrong and...”

“You would wish to apologise?” queried the Colonel icily.

The worthy soldier had heard something of Deroulede’s reputed bourgeois ancestry.  This suggestion of an apology was no doubt in accordance with the customs of the middle-classes, but the Colonel literally gasped at the unworthiness of the proceeding.  An apology?  Bah!  Disgusting! cowardly! beneath the dignity of any gentleman, however wrong he might be.  How could two soldiers of His Majesty’s army identify themselves with such doings?

But Deroulede seemed unconscious of the enormity of his suggestion.

“If I could avoid a conflict,” he said, “I would tell the Vicomte that I had no knowledge of his admiration for the lady we were discussing and...”

“Are you so very much afraid of getting a sword scratch, monsieur?” interrupted the Colonel impatiently, whilst M. de Quettare elevated a pair of aristocratic eyebrows in bewilderment at such an extraordinary display of bourgeois cowardice.

“You mean, Monsieur le Colonel?”—­queried Deroulede.

“That you must either fight the Vicomte de Marn to-night, or clear out of Paris to-morrow.  Your position in our set would become untenable,” retorted the Colonel, not unkindly, for in spite of Deroulede’s extraordinary attitude, there was nothing in his bearing or his appearance that suggested cowardice or fear.

“I bow to your superior knowledge of your friends, M. le Colonel,” responded Deroulede, as he silently drew his sword from its sheath.

The centre of the saloon was quickly cleared.  The seconds measured the length of the swords and then stood behind the antagonists, slightly in advance of the groups of spectators, who stood massed all round the room.

They represented the flower of what France had of the best and noblest in name, in lineage, in chivalry, in that year of grace 1783.  The storm-cloud which a few years hence was destined to break over their heads, sweeping them from their palaces to the prison and the guillotine, was only gathering very slowly in the dim horizon of squalid, starving Paris:  for the next half-dozen years they would still dance and gamble, fight and flirt, surround a tottering throne, and hoodwink a weak monarch.  The Fates’ avenging sword still rested in its sheath; the relentless, ceaseless wheel still bore them up in their whirl of pleasure; the downward movement had only just begun:  the cry of the oppressed children of France had not yet been heard above the din of dance music and lovers’ serenades.

The young Duc de Chateaudun was there, he who, nine years later, went to the guillotine on that cold September morning, his hair dressed in the latest fashion, the finest Mechlin lace around his wrists, playing a final game of piquet with his younger brother, as the tumbril bore them along through the hooting, yelling crowd of the half-naked starvelings of Paris.