At last the practical word was given.  The prince did not reply to my salute.  He was smoking, and kept his cigar in one corner of his mouth, as if he were a master fencer bidding his pupil to come on.  He assumed that he had to do with a bourgeois Briton unused to arms, such as we are generally held to be on the Continent.  After feeling my wrist for a while he shook the cigar out of his teeth.

The ‘cliquetis’ of the crossed steel must be very distant in memory, and yourself in a most dilettante frame of mind, for you to be accessible to the music of that thin skeleton’s clank.  Nevertheless, it is better and finer even at the time of action, than the abominable hollow ogre’s eye of the pistol-muzzle.  We exchanged passes, the prince chiefly attacking.  Of all the things to strike my thoughts, can you credit me that the vividest was the picture of the old woman Temple and I had seen in our boyhood on the night of the fire dropping askew, like forks of brown flame, from the burning house in London city; I must have smiled.  The prince cried out in French:  ‘Laugh, sir; you shall have it!’ He had nothing but his impetuosity for an assurance of his promise, and was never able to force me back beyond a foot.  I touched him on the arm and the shoulder, and finally pierced his arm above the elbow.  I could have done nearly what I liked with him; his skill was that of a common regimental sabreur.

‘Ludere qui nescit campestribus abstinet armis!’ Bandelmeyer sang out.

‘You observed?’ said Major Edelsheim, and received another disconcerting discharge of a Latin line.  The prince frowned and made use of some military slang.  Was his honour now satisfied?  Not a whit.  He certainly could not have kept his sword-point straight, and yet he clamoured to fight on, stamped, and summoned me to assault him, proposed to fight me with his left hand after his right had failed; in short, he was beside himself, an example of the predicament of a man who has given all the provocation and finds himself disabled.  My seconds could have stopped it had they been equal to their duties; instead of which Bandelmeyer, hearing what he deemed an insult to the order of student and scholar, retorted furiously and offensively, and Eckart, out of good-fellowship, joined him, whereat Major Edelsheim, in the act of bandaging the prince’s arm, warned them that he could not pass by an outrage on his uniform.  Count Loepel stept politely forward, and gave Eckart a significant bow.  The latter remarked mockingly, ‘With pleasure and condescension!’ At a murmur of the name of doctor from Edelsheim, the prince damned the doctor until he or I were food for him.  Irritated by the whole scene, and his extravagant vindictiveness, in which light I regarded the cloak of fury he had flung over the shame of his defeat, I called to Bandelmeyer to open his case of pistols and offer them for a settlement.  As the proposal came from me, it was found acceptable.  The major remonstrated with the prince, and expressed to me his regrets and et caeteras of well-meant civility.  He had a hard task to keep out of the hands of Bandelmeyer, who had seized my sword, and wanted vi et armis to defend the cause of Learning and the People against military brigands on the spot.  If I had not fallen we should have had one or two other prostrate bodies.