Before Borromee had time to recover from his astonishment, Chicot’s right fist struck him a heavy blow in the face, and sent him bleeding and stunned against the wall.

In a minute, however, he was up, and sword in hand; but this minute had sufficed for Chicot to draw his sword also, and prepare himself.  He seemed to shake off, as if by enchantment, all the fumes of the wine, and stood with a steady hand to receive his adversary.  The table, like a field of battle, covered with empty bottles, lay between them, but the blood flowing down his face infuriated Borromee, who lunged at his adversary as fiercely as the intervening table permitted.

“Dolt!” cried Chicot, “you see that it is decidedly you who are drunk, for you cannot reach me across the table, while my arm is six inches longer than yours, and my sword as much longer than your sword; and here is the proof.”

As he spoke, he stretched out his arm and wounded Borromee in the forehead.  Borromee uttered a cry, still more of rage than of pain, and as he was brave enough, attacked with double fury.

Chicot, however, still on the other side of the table, took a chair and sat down, saying, “Mon Dieu! how stupid these soldiers are; they pretend to know how to manage their swords, and any bourgeois, if he liked, could kill them like flies.  Ah! now you want to put out my eye.  And now you mount on the table; but, ventre de biche! take care, donkey.”  And he pricked him with his sword in the stomach, as he had already done in the forehead.

Borromee roared with anger and leaped from the table to the floor.

“That is as it should, be,” said Chicot; “now we are on the same level, and we can talk while we are fencing.  Ah! captain, captain, and so we sometimes try our hand a little at assassination in our spare moments, do we?”

“I do for my cause what you do for yours,” said Borromee, now brought back to the seriousness of his position, and terrified, in spite of himself, at the smothered fire which seemed gleaming in Chicot’s eyes.

“So much for talking,” said Chicot; “and yet, my friend, it is with no little pleasure I find that I am a better hand than you are.  Ah! that was not bad.”

Borromee had just made a lunge at Chicot, which had slightly touched his breast.

“Not bad, but I know the thrust—­it is the very same you showed little Jacques.  I was just saying, then, that I have the advantage of you, for I did not begin this quarrel, however anxiously disposed I might have been to do so.  More than that, even, I have allowed you to carry out your project by giving you every latitude you required, and yet at this very moment even, I have only been acting on the defensive, and this, because I have something to propose to you.”

“Nothing,” cried Borromee, exasperated at Chicot’s imperturbability, “nothing.”

And he gave a thrust which would have run the Gascon completely through the body, if the latter had not, with his long legs, sprung back a step, which placed him out of his adversary’s reach.