He dared not even to speak to them, wish them good-day, utter a single word, lest his changed voice should betray him.

“All is arranged as you wished,” said the colonel.  “Your adversary claimed at first the privilege of the offended part; but he yielded almost at once, and accepted your conditions.  His seconds are two military men.”

“Thank you,” said the vicomte.

The marquis added: 

“Please excuse us if we do not stay now, for we have a good deal to see to yet.  We shall want a reliable doctor, since the duel is not to end until a serious wound has been inflicted; and you know that bullets are not to be trifled with.  We must select a spot near some house to which the wounded party can be carried if necessary.  In fact, the arrangements will take us another two or three hours at least.”

The vicomte articulated for the second time: 

“Thank you.”

“You’re all right?” asked the colonel.  “Quite calm?”

“Perfectly calm, thank you.”

The two men withdrew.

When he was once more alone he felt as though he should go mad.  His servant having lighted the lamps, he sat down at his table to write some letters.  When he had traced at the top of a sheet of paper the words:  “This is my last will and testament,” he started from his seat, feeling himself incapable of connected thought, of decision in regard to anything.

So he was going to fight!  He could no longer avoid it.  What, then, possessed him?  He wished to fight, he was fully determined to fight, and yet, in spite of all his mental effort, in spite of the exertion of all his will power, he felt that he could not even preserve the strength necessary to carry him through the ordeal.  He tried to conjure up a picture of the duel, his own attitude, and that of his enemy.

Every now and then his teeth chattered audibly.  He thought he would read, and took down Chateauvillard’s Rules of Dueling.  Then he said: 

“Is the other man practiced in the use of the pistol?  Is he well known?  How can I find out?”

He remembered Baron de Vaux’s book on marksmen, and searched it from end to end.  Georges Lamil was not mentioned.  And yet, if he were not an adept, would he have accepted without demur such a dangerous weapon and such deadly conditions?

He opened a case of Gastinne Renettes which stood on a small table, and took from it a pistol.  Next he stood in the correct attitude for firing, and raised his arm.  But he was trembling from head to foot, and the weapon shook in his grasp.

Then he said to himself: 

“It is impossible.  I cannot fight like this.”

He looked at the little black, death-spitting hole at the end of the pistol; he thought of dishonor, of the whispers at the clubs, the smiles in his friends’ drawing-rooms, the contempt of women, the veiled sneers of the newspapers, the insults that would be hurled at him by cowards.