For more information about this project, please see past posts under the “Sense and Sensibility and Placage” category. Claude has the reputation of being good at writing climactic scenes and rather overwrought for everything else. This was the kind of scene at which it excels. I trimmed a little bombast before and after the duel itself, and Claude’s persistant and unlikely references to cold January weather in New Orleans.

The Duel

They met at dawn on the Allard plantation, half a mile past the city’s edge on the Metairie Road, which was the traditional place for dueling. Morin had been to this ground once before, as a witness, and remembered it as a flat expanse of winter grass between an oak grove and a drainage ditch, the oaks large enough to have watched a considerable number of these mornings and indifferent to all of them.

He arrived with Louis Palmiere, who had agreed to serve as second. Louis had managed the formal arrangements with the Villarreal second, a cousin named Esteban who was young and nervous and trying not to show it, and the arrangements were correct in every particular, which meant that when the morning went wrong it would not go wrong on a technicality.

The surgeon arrived shortly after them, a Creole doctor named Valcourt whom Louis had engaged and who carried his bag with the resigned practicality of a man who has attended enough of these mornings to have lost whatever feelings he had once had about them. He nodded to Morin and went to stand at the edge of the oak grove and looked at the middle distance and waited, which was what surgeons did at these things.

The sky above the oaks was the color of pewter, lightening in the east over the river but not yet light, and the grass was wet with the night’s damp and dark underfoot. The drainage ditch at the far edge of the field breathed a faint smell of standing water and rotting vegetation into the still air, and somewhere in the oaks a bird was performing its territorial obligations with a persistence that seemed, in the circumstances, faintly absurd.

Morin stood at the edge of the field and breathed the cold air and let the morning be what it was.

He had slept. This had surprised him slightly and he had examined it and concluded that it was the sleep of a man who has made a decision that resolves rather than creates uncertainty. He had risen before dawn and dressed without haste and eaten something, because fighting without eating was tactically poor regardless of how one felt about food at five in the morning. He had ridden to the Palmiere house and collected Louis and ridden out of the city.

He had not said goodbye to Élise before leaving. They had said what needed to be said two evenings ago, when she had come to his study and found him cleaning the sword, which was a thing that communicated its own message. She had sat across from him and watched him work the cloth along the blade and said, without preamble, that she needed him to come back. He had said that he intended to. She had looked at him with the look that meant she understood the distinction between intending and guaranteeing and was choosing to accept the intention, and then she had sat with him in the amber lamplight without speaking for an hour, the way she had sat with him in this same study in the October afternoons when she had been carrying her secret and seeking his presence without being able to explain why.

He thought, briefly, about Marianne on the gallery in the January sun and about the conversation they had not quite had, and he put this thought in the same place he had been putting it for weeks and focused on the field.

Alejandro arrived with Esteban and two other men who stayed with the horses at the road’s edge. He was dressed plainly, as the occasion required, and he moved across the wet grass with the ease of a man in his own world, which this was. This particular ritual of Spanish Creole honor had been conducted on this ground by families like his for a long time. He did not look at Morin.

Louis and Esteban conferred in the formal manner, establishing the terms, which had already been established and were being established again because the form required it. First blood, with the option of continuation at either party’s refusal to yield. Morin had no intention of refusing to yield at first blood if first blood was all this required. He had not come here to kill Alejandro if killing was avoidable. He had come here to make the answer for what Alejandro had done, and the answer could take more than one form, and he was prepared for all of them.

They walked to the center of the field, the wet grass dark around their boots, and faced each other in the pewter light, and the surgeon moved from the oak grove to a better position, and Louis and Esteban took their places at the edges, and the bird in the oaks continued its performance, and the sky lightened another degree over the river.

Morin looked at Alejandro and thought about nothing in particular, which was the state he had learned to achieve before engagements, the clearing of the mental field that allowed attention to be fully present rather than distributed across past and future. He had first learned this at seventeen, in the hills above Saint-Domingue, before an action that he had not expected to survive and had survived. He observed Alejandro with the attention he would have given any opponent: the set of the shoulders, the distribution of weight.

Esteban gave the signal and they engaged.

Alejandro was good. This was the first thing Morin established in the opening exchange, a rapid assessment that cost him a near touch to the forearm and yielded the information that his opponent had been well taught and had practiced recently and had the natural aggression of a young man of twenty-three who has grown up understanding this ritual as the ultimate recourse of his world and has prepared for it accordingly. He pressed hard from the first, with the controlled ferocity of someone who wants this finished quickly, and Morin gave ground deliberately, reading the patterns, the slight telegraphing of the shoulder before the extension, the preference for the high line, the tendency under pressure to increase tempo in ways that compromised the precision of the blade.

He read these things carefully and gave ground and waited.

The first blood came at four minutes, a clean touch to Alejandro’s sword arm that opened a shallow cut across the outer forearm, and Morin stepped back immediately and looked to Louis, which was the correct response to first blood and gave Alejandro the opportunity the form required.

Esteban moved forward. There was a brief conference. Morin waited with his sword at his side and his breathing steady, and he watched Alejandro’s face across the field and he knew before Esteban turned back to Louis what the answer was going to be.

“He declines to yield,” Louis said.

“Very well,” Morin said, and brought his sword up again.

What followed was different. Alejandro came back to the engagement with something that had moved past controlled ferocity into a recklessness that was either courage or desperation. He was bleeding from the forearm and ignoring it, which Morin noted and factored, and he was pressing at a tempo that was not sustainable at his skill level for more than another few minutes, and he was taking risks with his defense that were the risks of a man who has concluded that attack is his only viable strategy and has committed to it entirely.

Morin gave ground again and let the tempo come and watched the patterns with the patience of a man who has conducted this calculation many times, in conditions considerably less controlled than a flat field outside New Orleans in January, and he waited for the thing he knew was coming.

It came at seven minutes. Alejandro extended past his balance on a thrust that would have been dangerous if it had landed and was instead an overcommitment, the sword arm extended too far, the recovery a half-second too slow, and Morin turned it and stepped inside it with the economy of someone who has stopped thinking about what he is doing because thinking about it is slower than doing it, and the engagement was effectively over at that point, which Alejandro understood a moment after it was too late to do anything about.

The wound was in the upper chest, on the left side, which was not where Morin had intended it, and was immediately and clearly serious in a way that first blood had not been.

Alejandro went down onto the wet grass with the surprised expression of a man who has genuinely not believed until this moment that the morning might end this way, and the surgeon was moving before he had fully fallen, Louis and Esteban both crossing the field, and Morin stood where he was and looked at what he had done and took an accurate account of it, because taking an accurate account was what the moment required.

He had not intended the chest. He had intended the sword arm, the disabling wound that would end the engagement without ending Alejandro, and the over-extension had moved the geometry of it at the last half-second in a way that had not allowed for adjustment. He did not know whether Alejandro would survive. From the look of it and the behavior of the surgeon, who was working with a focused urgency that communicated its own information, the answer was not obvious.

He stood on the wet grass with the sword at his side and the pewter sky above the oaks and the smell of the drainage ditch, and he looked at the oak grove and the surgeon working and Alejandro’s cousin kneeling in the wet grass and Louis standing at the edge of it all with the expression of a man witnessing something he knew was going to have consequences.

It was not satisfaction. He had known it would not be satisfaction and he had been right. It was something quieter and less clean than satisfaction, the feeling of a thing irrevocably done that had needed to be done and was done and could not be undone, and underneath it the particular gravity of a man who has taken a life before and knows that knowing you had reason does not make the knowledge of it lighter, only bearable.

He did not feel grief for Alejandro. He examined this honestly and found it to be true. He felt the weight of the act and he felt the gravity of it and he did not feel that it had been wrong, and these things could coexist and did, and had before, and he had learned to carry them and would carry this one.

He cleaned the sword on the wet grass in the way he had learned to do these things and sheathed it and walked to where Louis was standing.

“We need to go,” Louis said quietly. He was watching the surgeon and his voice had the practical urgency of a man who has already moved from what has happened to what needs to happen next.

“Yes,” Morin said.

“I will manage what needs managing here.” Louis looked at him. “You have perhaps until this evening before it is known. By morning at the latest.”

“I know,” Morin said. “It is enough.”

He looked once more at the surgeon working in the wet grass and at the oaks and the pewter sky above them, and at the field where the bird had finally stopped its noise in the sudden quiet of the morning, and then he turned and walked back to the road where the horses were and mounted and rode back toward the city without looking back, because looking back was not going to change anything and there was a great deal to do before evening, and he had never found looking back a useful expenditure of time.

The road was empty in the early morning and the city came back toward him gradually as he rode. He rode through it and thought about the things that needed doing and in what order, and he thought about the farm and Joseph and the arrangements that would need to be made quickly, and he thought about a riverboat and a road going north through a country neither of them knew very well, and he thought about Élise and Pascal and the weight and warmth of being someone’s home, which was what he had been to Élise across all the years of her life and what he intended to go on being in a city he had never seen, and he thought about Marianne on the gallery saying I find I am thinking about it quite seriously…

He put the horse up at the livery on Rue Tremé and walked the rest of the way to the Morin house in the Faubourg, where Élise would be feeding Pascal his morning meal and the kitchen would smell of coffee and the ordinary day would be going about its business, and he went in through the gate and crossed the courtyard and opened the door, and Élise looked up from the chair where she was sitting with Pascal and looked at his face, and said nothing for a moment, and then said, “Are you hurt?”

“No,” he said.

She looked at him for another moment and then said, “Sit down. I will get coffee.”

He sat down, and she brought coffee, and Pascal regarded him from her shoulder with the serious attention of someone forming considered opinions about the arrangements, and outside the courtyard gate the city went about its morning, and there was a great deal still to do, and he drank his coffee and began.