Two Celebrated Duels

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 107, 8 March 1892, Page 4

Two Celebrated Duels

The Count de Larilliere was one of the most celebrated duellists of the Bourbon restoration period, when scarcely a day passed that did not witness a hostile encounter between tke officers of Napoleon's army and these of the Allies. Larilliere used to insult women in the street when accompanied by their husbands to provoke the latter to a duel, and boasted of having killed no less than eleven individuals, his last victim being the youn£ and very popular Chevalier de C. While taking: a glass of punch in a cafe a tall young man wearing a black domino, walked up to Larilliere's table, seized hold of the bully's glass, and, throwing away the contents, ordered the waiter to bring a small bottle of orgeat in place of it. With a pistol to the duellist's head, the stranger forced him to drink the orgeat to the dregs in the presence of a hundred spectators, saying, " I have humiliated you euojfrh to-dny; I shall kill you to morrow. ' They fought next <iay, and Larilliere was stabbed to the heart on the very spot where, some days previously," he had killed the young Chevalier de C. A duellist of highly -practised skill who opposes in combat a man possessing no skill whatever, is little better than a coward, and is certainly a murderer. In 1815, in Paris, a duel with pistols was fought between a young Englishman of eighteen and a Frenchman, a veteron swashbuckler of forty-five. The cause of the quarrel was a silly after dinner joke made by the young Englishman, and which the Frenchman twisted into an insult. The combatants were placed twenty paces from a line chalked in the centre, towards which they were to advance and fire at will. The Englishman, who was in as great dread of taking his enemy's li*e as of losing his own, fired at random and missed. His opponent reserved his fire until he got up to the line* " Have you a mother ?" he asked. " Yes," came the reply. " Then I pity her," and the brute blew out the lad's brains. — Evening Standard.