For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Not much to report about the drafting process. Claude was surprisingly gung ho about outlining this, arguing that this particular handling of the leadup to the duel would be the most cathartic for Morin and the readers. This is the AI’s first draft, with the usual human streamlining.

The Challenge

He sent the request for a meeting through Louis Palmiere, which was the correct channel and also the strategic one. Palmiere had business connexions to the Villarreal family’s commercial interests and his name on the note would ensure it was read rather than discarded, and it would communicate to Alejandro, before they were in the same room, that the man requesting the meeting had friends in the city’s mercantile world and was not without resources. Morin had learned, across a military career conducted largely in circumstances of significant disadvantage, that the impression made before an encounter was often as important as the encounter itself.

He had spent three days after Élise’s confession on the gallery doing what he had trained himself to do with things that required action: set them aside until the action could be taken usefully. Marianne needed his attention and Élise needed his steadiness and the farm needed its ordinary management and none of these things were served by what he was feeling. He had told Élise she had done the right thing and he had meant it. He had asked about soup. He had gone about the business of the days with the discipline of a man who has learned that discipline is not the absence of feeling but its correct management. He had waited until Marianne was well enough and Edward had come up the River Road and the group’s plans had taken sufficient shape that he could be confident of the timing.

The timing mattered. He needed the meeting with Alejandro to happen after the departure from the Morin property was organized but before the departure from New Orleans was imminent, which gave him a window of perhaps a week. He needed the duel, if Alejandro accepted, to happen before the group left the city, because leaving without settling the matter was not something he was willing to do. He had calculated all of this with the patience of a man who had conducted military operations under considerably more adverse conditions than a January morning in New Orleans.

He rode down to the city on a Wednesday morning, leaving the farm in Joseph’s capable hands, and called on Louis Palmiere at the house on Rue Toulouse.

Louis received him in his study, which was a room that smelled of coffee and ship manifests. Morin had known Louis Palmiere for two years, well enough to trust him, and Louis had known him long enough to understand, when Morin explained what he needed, that this was not a conversation requiring a great deal of elaboration.

“You want me to carry a note to Villarreal,” Louis said.

“I want him to receive a request for a private meeting,” Morin said. “Not a challenge. A meeting. The challenge comes after, if the meeting goes as I expect it to go.”

Louis looked at him with the assessment of a man calculating risk, which was what he did with everything. “And if he refuses the meeting.”

“He will not refuse the meeting,” Morin said. “He does not yet know what kind of meeting it is.”

Louis was quiet for a moment. “This will have consequences for you.”

“I have considered the consequences,” Morin said. “They are acceptable.”

Another pause. Louis looked at the window and then back at Morin and said, with the directness that was his most reliable quality, “Ferrars tells me you are thinking of Philadelphia.”

“I am going to Philadelphia,” Morin said. “The thinking is finished.”

Louis nodded once, in the way of someone receiving information that confirms what they had already concluded, and picked up his pen and wrote the note, and Morin read it and found it sufficient, and Louis sent it by his own man that afternoon.

The reply came the following morning. Alejandro would receive Colonel Morin at his family’s house on Rue Esplanade at eleven o’clock on Friday. The note was written in the formal Spanish manner and its tone was the tone of a man who has been asked for a meeting by someone he considers beneath him and is granting it from the superior position of someone doing a courtesy rather than receiving one. Morin read it and noted the tone and set it aside.

He arrived at the Villarreal house on Friday at eleven o’clock precisely. The servant who admitted him was correct and without warmth, and he was shown to a study on the ground floor. The furniture was heavy and dark and Spanish in character, the furniture of a family that had been in this city since before it was an American city and intended to remain in it long after.

Alejandro came in after four minutes, which was long enough to communicate that he had other things to attend to and short enough to stop short of outright rudeness. He was dressed well, as he always was, and he had the composed ease of a man on his own ground, and he looked at Morin with the particular quality of attention that was not quite assessment and not quite dismissal but managed to suggest both.

“Colonel Morin,” he said. He did not offer his hand.

“Señor Villarreal,” Morin said. He did not sit, because Alejandro had not invited him to sit.

Alejandro looked at him for a moment with the slight adjustment of expression of a man recalibrating his initial assessment and said, “I understand you wished to speak with me privately. I have given you the opportunity. I would be grateful if you would come to the point.”

“I will come to the point,” Morin said. “I am here about my niece, Élise Morin. And about a child named Pascal, who was baptized some weeks ago at Saint Louis Cathedral in this city, and whose father I am given to understand is yourself.”

The quality of the silence that followed was specific and informative. It was not the silence of a man hearing something for the first time. It was the silence of a man hearing something he had been waiting to hear and calculating, in real time, what the correct response to hearing it was. Morin watched this calculation happen behind Alejandro’s composed face and found it instructive.

“I am not certain,” Alejandro said at last, with the careful precision of a man who has decided that precision is his best available defense, “what you are suggesting, or on what basis.”

“I am not suggesting anything,” Morin said. “I am telling you what my niece has told me, which is that you are the father of her child, that you were fully aware of her condition, and that you chose to do nothing about it.” He paused. “I am also telling you that you spent some portion of the same season in which you were conducting yourself in this manner toward my niece doing the same to another young woman.”

Alejandro looked at him. His composure had not broken but it had thinned.

“These are serious accusations,” he said.

“They are accurate ones,” Morin said. “Which is a different matter.”

“You will understand,” Alejandro said, with the recovered authority of a man retreating to his strongest ground, “that I am not in a position to respond to accusations of this nature from,” he paused, with the deliberate quality of a man selecting his next word as a weapon, “from a man in your position.”

The room was very quiet. The smell of tobacco and leather and the distant kitchen sweetness, and the heavy Spanish furniture, and the two of them standing in it.

“I had anticipated that response,” Morin said. “Which is why I have come to you privately rather than publicly. You have, at this moment, a choice that you will not have once I leave this room.” He looked at Alejandro with the steadiness of a man who has faced considerably worse and is not going to look away from this. “You can meet me on the field and have the matter resolved in the manner that honor requires. Or you can decline to meet me on the grounds you have just suggested, and I will ensure that the nature of my request and the grounds of your refusal are known in every drawing room in this city before your wedding.”

Alejandro’s face had done something during this that was not quite visible and not quite invisible.

“Doña Isabel,” Morin continued, in the same quiet tone, “is a woman who, I am told, has been building toward this wedding for some years and has decided views about the family’s honor. I think she would find your grounds for refusal as interesting as anyone.”

The silence that followed was of a different quality from the previous ones. It was the silence of someone doing a very rapid calculation about which of two bad outcomes was more survivable.

“You are threatening me,” Alejandro said. There was something in it that might have been outrage and might have been the performance of outrage and Morin did not particularly care which.

“I am giving you a choice,” Morin said. “The threat is the situation you created. I am simply describing it accurately.”

Alejandro looked at him with an expression that was colder and more genuine than anything he had shown before in this room. He said nothing for a moment, and then he said, “You understand that this will not end well for you, regardless of the outcome.”

“I understand that,” Morin said.

“And you persist.”

“Of course.”

“You will have your meeting,” Alejandro said. “On the field. Name your second.”

“I will have my second contact yours by tomorrow morning,” Morin said.

He turned to go, because there was nothing further to be said in this room and he had not come here to say more than was necessary. He was at the door when Alejandro said, from behind him, “I had not taken you for a man who throws his life away on a matter of honor.”

Morin stopped. He did not turn around immediately. He looked at the door in front of him and thought about Élise on the gallery with Pascal against her shoulder saying I should have told you sooner, and about Marianne in the fever saying things about being discarded for what she was. He allowed himself five seconds of quiet anger and then he said, without turning around, “I had not taken you for a coward as well as a seducer. We have both been surprised.”

He walked out of the Villarreal house on Rue Esplanade into the January noon and stood for a moment on the banquette. He put his hat on and went to find his second. There was a great deal to do and not much time to do it, and he had never in his life found self-congratulation a useful expenditure of time.