By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Practice smallswords were exactly like their dueling counterparts, only with a button masking the tip of the blade. At the court of Louis XIV, however, smallswords were considered dull, and demand arose for the thrill and challenge of dueling, but without the injuries. So began a search (probably encouraged by the king’s fencing master, the appropriately named Philibert de La Touche) for a new weapon, which in due course produced a blunted, lighter rectangular-section foil, the first purely sporting weapon. The French also introduced umpires (originally “nonpeers,” below the social standing of the participants), whose job was to declare the winner after a bout had lasted for a set period.

  From the influential instruction manual by André de Liancour, 1686. His fencers practice their moves while a naval battle rages behind them. (illustration credit 4.2)

  The introduction of the foil marked a watershed. At first there was little difference between dueling ground and salle: foil play at both was cautious, deliberate, and technically correct. In these early days, the target lay between collar and belt, the top of which had to be at least a foot below the chin.‖

  Self-preservation remained a prime concern. One safeguard was the height of one’s fencing hand. The greatest compliment paid to the renowned foilist Saint-Georges by his master, Texier La Boessière, was on the elevation of his hand and the consequence that his sword never touched a man in the face. Early masks were made of leather or tinplate with peepholes or a horizontal eye slit that protected only the eyes and nose. “People have had to don a mask as a precaution against attacks which could hit one’s eyes even though performed in accordance with the art of fencing,” said a French encyclopedia of 1755. “It is true that those who are rather less skillful at the sport can wound their opponent by fighting incorrectly, or can wound him while executing a poor parry. Certainly such a way of fencing today is quite unacceptable.” So masks were regarded with some unease: donning one showed that you didn’t trust your opponent not to hurt you, which bordered on the insulting. It was also seen as not quite manly to take such care of oneself.

  This ambivalence about masks continued until in rapid succession three masters lost an eye. Around 1750 La Boessière introduced a new form of mask, made from wire mesh, and while the old guard continued to view it as a substitute for skill, the new mask made possible both greater speed and versatility, although it took a generation to become accepted. Strict conventions ensured courtesy as well as formality—something of an irony, since by this time the French were gaining a reputation for being the most quarrelsome nation in Europe. But the new conventions allowed a whole repertoire of movements, known as phrases d’armes or sequences of play—attack, parry, riposte, counterriposte—the integral parts of what was called a “conversation” of blades.

  IN A NATION OF DUELISTS HUNGRY FOR HEROES, ONE WOULD EXPECT several real-life contenders—and SO there were. Cyrano de Bergerac comes down to us principally as the long-nosed lover-poet of Edmond Rostand’s late-nineteenth-century play. In real life he was a well-born Parisian, Savinien de Cyrano, Sieur de Bergerac (1619–55), a moderately successful writer and playwright, far from celebrated in his own time. As a student he attended lectures with Molière, joined a group of “sacrilegious roisterers,” and later killed at least ten men in duels (of which he is said to have fought more than a thousand). On one occasion, going to the aid of a friend, he dispersed a crowd of more than a hundred at his single sword’s point, a legendary feat. He did have a large nose, which became even more grotesque from injuries and was the excuse for many of his challenges.

  Although never a musketeer, Cyrano joined the army. He was for a time incapacitated by wounds received at the siege of Arras in 1640 and eventually retired to a life of contemplation and authorship. He tried his hand at almost every literary form; his main successes were two posthumous works, translated as Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (1657), a satiric form of science fiction that later suggested Gulliver to Swift. In 1654 a beam (the wooden kind, not from some outraged planet) fell on his head, and he eventually died from the injury several months later, at the age of thirty-six. In Rostand’s play Cyrano dies more appropriately, asserting in his final breath that he will “still possess, at any rate, / Unscathed, something outlasting mortal flesh, / And that is … [falls into the arms of a comrade] My panache!” He is referring to his integrity, or individuality; there is no perfect English rendering, but Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way” captures the spirit.

  OTHER WRITERS, FROM MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ TO JEAN DE LA Fontaine and François de La Rochefoucauld, found themselves caught up in colorful duels, but it was four serving soldiers who captured the imagination of the public. In 1600 a special force was created by Henri IV for his personal guard, originally armed with carbines and called “Carabiniers.” Louis XIII rearmed them with muskets, making them part of a company of pikemen, and renamed them “musketeers.” They were disbanded in 1646, then reembodied in 1657, when they numbered 150. They were originally equipped with gray horses with long tails and known as the “Gray Musketeers” until, on a further whim, the king gave them black stallions, so that their sobriquet changed to “Black Musketeers.” They were disbanded once more in 1776, reassembled again only to be dissolved in 1791, and finally faded away after Waterloo.

  The King’s Musketeers would be no more than a historical footnote had it not been for Alexandre Dumas—but not only Dumas was struck by their story. The inspiration for The Three Musketeers and its sequels, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne, was a quite different work of fiction: The Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan, Captain-Lieutenant in the First Company of the King’s Musketeers, first published between 1700 and 1701, in Cologne and Amsterdam but never in France. It ran into three editions, establishing d’Artagnan’s name.

  The Memoirs of M. d’Artagnan was the brainchild of a hack writer, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, himself a onetime musketeer, who started to write in 1678, at thirty-four, while imprisoned in the Bastille. Under the cover of being their editor, he fabricated the memoirs of about twenty people. As with his other creations, the d’Artagnan memoirs were based on fact, in this case the career of a real-life soldier, and offer a fairly accurate account of their subject’s history. The real d’Artagnan found writing an onerous exercise and one rarely to be attempted, but the reading public was completely fooled. Dumas decided to continue the initial deception and presented the serialized adventures of d’Artagnan in 1848 as a true account, just in greater detail than the original autobiography. Not until 1910 did the first serious biography of d’Artagnan appear.

  The flesh-and-blood d’Artagnan was born in 1615 in Gascony, which to the French of that time was a savage frontier. Its people were swarthy and “destitute to the last degree.”13 D’Artagnan’s family name was Batz, which became Batz-Castelmore when his father inherited that estate. Castelmore lay on the borders of Armagnac and Fezensac, within sight of the Pyrenees. Bertrand de Batz had five sons and three daughters; his first and youngest sons were both called Charles. The elder Charles joined the Musketeers in 1633 but died soon after. A second brother, Paul, a captain in the army, governed a district in the Pyrenees for forty years and died at ninety-four, having outlived all his siblings.

  The younger Charles—literature’s d’Artagnan—left for Paris in 1638 or 1640; Dumas has him do so in 1625, when the real d’Artagnan was only ten. Bertrand died in 1635, at least three years before his son’s departure. Nor was there any “Buttercup”—d’Artagnan’s trusty steed—to carry the young Charles to Paris. The three musketeers were real enough, though. Aramis—Henri d’Aramitz—was a squire and lay priest, the nephew of Treville, in real life M. de Tresvilles, the captain of the Musketeers. Athos—Armand de Sillegue, Lord of Athos, Treville’s cousin’s son—fell in a duel before d’Artagnan ever joined up. Porthos—Isaac de Portau—arrived in Paris only a year before d’Artagnan and, initially turned down by the Musketeers, was forced to prove himself in action with another regiment before he was finally accepted in 1
643. “Milady” was not Anne de Breuil, Duchesse de Winter, but the Countess of Carlisle, who was indeed one of Richelieu’s secret agents and who did steal two diamond studs from the Duke of Buckingham.

  D’Artagnan himself was a brave and resourceful soldier who in his first outing as a musketeer returned with a bullet through his hat and three more through his uniform. He next distinguished himself in various sieges between 1640 and 1642, getting a reputation for impetuosity, love of action for its own sake, and undertaking any adventure that could be justified as serving “the honor of France.” After the Musketeers were disbanded in 1646, he was appointed confidential agent to Richelieu’s successor, Cardinal Mazarin, and traveled on his behalf to Italy, England, and Germany, as well as smuggling the unpopular prelate out of Paris to Rueil, just as Dumas relates in Twenty Years After.

  A lover of justice, a good diplomat (but never a courtier), d’Artagnan was also a skilled swordsman, probably better than Dumas makes him out to be. In the sixty-seven chapters of The Three Musketeers he fights just four duels. One of these he wins less through his own efforts than because his adversary, Bernajoux, impales himself. In another he does no more than disarm the baron; and against the Comte de Wardes he takes three thrusts to down his man. Only in his first fight, against de Jussac of the Cardinal’s Guards, is he shown as skillful, and it is an interesting commentary on Dumas’s day that d’Artagnan’s swordplay is observed through the prism of accepted French style—which sometimes the young Gascon respects, sometimes not:

  [D’Artagnan] fought like a furious tiger, turning ten times round his adversary, and changing his ground and guard position twenty times. Jussac was, as they expressed it in those days, a fine blade, and had been well taught; nevertheless, it required all his skill to defend himself against an opponent who, full of life and energy, had little regard for normal fencing rules, attacking him in every line at once, and yet parrying him like a man who had the greatest respect for his own skin.

  This contest at length tried Jussac’s patience. Frustrated at being held in check by a rival he considered a boy, he grew incensed, and started to make mistakes. D’Artagnan, who, though wanting in practice, had a good understanding of swordsmanship, redoubled his efforts. Jussac, anxious to put an end to things, sprang forward, aiming a terrible thrust at his young quarry, but the latter parried it and, while Jussac was recovering, glided like a serpent beneath his blade, passing his sword through his body. Jussac fell like a log.

  In reality, d’Artagnan, far from going to the Pré aux Clercs to fight Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, had gone there with them for a prearranged duel with some of the Cardinal’s guards, Athos having sent word to Jussac to bring another man to complete the party. As for Bernajoux, after wounding him d’Artagnan personally nursed him back to health, and the men became lifelong friends. The historical d’Artagnan ended up in command of the king’s Grand Musketeers, “the most coveted appointment in France,” but his private life was disastrous. He had married at forty, but neglected his wife for his career; after six years they separated without having had children. In 1672 he became governor of Lille, and was killed the following year, at the siege of Maastricht, a few feet away from Captain Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill’s great-great-great-grandfather. His body was found two days later, a Dutch musketball lodged in its throat. In his will d’Artagnan left “two swords, one with an unpolished gold guard and a brass hilt; the other of black steel.”

  THREE YEARS BEFORE D’ARTAGNAN FELL, THERE WAS BORN ANOTHER champion fencer who would become a character in fiction. She was immortalized in an 1835 novel by Théophile Gautier: Julie d’Aubigny, known as “La Maupin,” was the daughter of Gaston d’Aubigny, secretary to the Count of Armagnac, one of the seven great officers of the Crown. Gaston was a noted hedonist and swordsman, and his daughter’s first instructor. By the time she was sixteen she could best most of the men she met at her father’s salle. Slender, “with firm muscles and breasted almost like a boy,”14 she had a beautiful face, and soon d’Armagnac claimed her as his mistress. She was found a husband, a colorless figure whom she so ignored that even before her eighteenth birthday he ruefully departed Paris for the country, leaving his young wife to her pleasures.

  La Maupin felt confident enough to drop the aging d’Armagnac and set up with a certain Baron de Seranne, an accomplished fencing master, with whom she frequented the leading salles of the city, honing her skills. She was still only eighteen when Seranne, having killed a man in a duel, had to abandon Paris for the safer environs of Marseilles. La Maupin accompanied him, financing them both by exhibitions of fencing in the smoky taproom of their local tavern. She would dress as a man; one night, when revellers taunted that she was no lady, she flung down her foil and tore away her shirt “so that all could determine the question for themselves.”

  She was growing restless, however, and finding she possessed a beautiful if untrained contralto, gained an audition with the director of the Marseilles Academy, who engaged her at once, despite her inexperience. Her debut was a sensation: a woman contralto was a “new tone” in French opera. Seranne now passes from the picture, and La Maupin embarked on a series of celebrated affairs—with women as well as men. On one occasion, she fell violently in love with a young Marseillaise, followed her to a convent at Avignon, and promptly kidnapped her. After three months the ravished novice returned to her parents, and soon an edict condemning the “sieur” d’Aubigny to death by fire was published throughout southern France. (The erroneous title was a tactful way of denying the lesbian relationship.) La Maupin hastened to Paris, where she confirmed her reputation as a “marvelous lover and an ardent mistress.” Firm-willed yet impulsive, she was also playful and warmhearted, and loyal after her fashion. She now enjoyed her first duel, calling out the actor-tenor Dumeni over a supposed insult; when he refused to fight his “male” challenger she gave him a thrashing, then stole his watch and snuffbox, parading them as trophies. Another actor who offended her and refused to fight was forced to kneel and beg forgiveness.

  La Maupin entertained high social ambitions and at last found herself invited to a masked ball hosted by the king’s brother, the bisexual Philippe de France, “Monsieur,” the Duc d’Orléans, at the Palais-Royal. Dressed once again as a man—in a red silk suit embroidered in gold—she confidently swept her women partners around the dance floor, performing the coranto, the branle, and the pavane, all the while whispering to them lasciviously from behind her mask. Emboldened by her success, she seized a young marquise by the arm, kissed her on the mouth, and propositioned her. The alarmed young noblewoman summoned three of her admirers. As these moved in on her, La Maupin declared that she would meet all three under the first lamp bracket on the rue St.-Thomas-du-Louvre, a few minutes’ walk away, and exact her satisfaction.

  Off she strode to the rendezvous, only to find that the lamps had not yet been lit—but a full moon had risen, sometimes bathing the street in light, at others disappearing behind a cloud. Her opponents arrived, complaining about the darkness. “What difference does it make?” their scarlet adversary replied, and dispatched each in turn before returning to the Duc’s dance floor.

  Seeking out her host, she explained what had taken place and politely asked him to arrange for the wounded to be taken home. The Duc said he would petition his brother to give her a full pardon. For the next week the court was agog at the scandal and keen to see if La Maupin would fetch up in the Bastille. But the Duc was as good as his word, and the King let it be known, through the Inspector of the Opera, Destouches, that she would not be charged.15 La Maupin wisely withdrew to Brussels, where before long she became mistress of the Elector of Bavaria, one of the four great secular princes of the Holy Roman Empire and Governor of the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium). For more than a year she enjoyed being ex officio first lady, but tiring of her patron she decamped to Spain. Short of funds, she became personal maid to a Countess Marino, whose hauteur she rewarded by dressing her for a grand
ball and secretly stuffing her hair with radishes. By the time an irate and ridiculed countess returned to rail at her maid, La Maupin had departed for Paris once more, taking a leisurely route via Poitiers and Rouen, encountering the love of her life, the Comte d’Albert, in the first city, during a swordfight, and a more than useful paramour in the second—Gabriel-Vincent Thévenard, an ambitious young singer determined to conquer Paris with his powerful bass.

  Soon Gabriel had arranged for both himself and La Maupin to sing at the Opera, and she made her debut there in 1690. She continued as one of the company’s principals till 1705, seeing d’Albert at regular intervals; then suddenly she turned on her hedonistic past and entered a convent, where she died shortly afterward, aged thirty-seven. “Beautiful, valiant, generous and superbly unchaste,” one American biographer calls her, linking Maupin with such figures as Belle Starr and Calamity Jane, though adding, “In her skill as a fighter with a designated and particular weapon she stands in a place apart.”

  FRENCH FENCING HAD TWO FAMOUS AMBASSADORS IN ENGLAND, neither of whom was French. Domenico Angelo Malevolti Tremamondo (literally, “Angel Nasty Twist Shake the World”) was the most renowned master of his time; William Hope, the author of an influential English-language book on French fencing style.