They were to make excursions when her brother came, she said.  Roland de Croisnel’s colonel, Coin de Grandchamp, happened to be engaged in a duel, which great business detained Roland.  It supplied Beauchamp with an excuse for staying, that he was angry with himself for being pleased to have; so he attacked the practice of duelling, and next the shrug, wherewith M. Livret and M. d’Orbec sought at first to defend the foul custom, or apologize for it, or plead for it philosophically, or altogether cast it off their shoulders; for the literal interpretation of the shrug in argument is beyond human capacity; it is the point of speech beyond our treasury of language.  He attacked the shrug, as he thought, very temperately; but in controlling his native vehemence he grew, perforce of repression, and of incompetency to deliver himself copiously in French, sarcastic.  In fine, his contrast of the pretence of their noble country to head civilization, and its encouragement of a custom so barbarous, offended M. d’Orbec and irritated M. Livret.

The latter delivered a brief essay on Gallic blood; the former maintained that Frenchmen were the best judges of their own ways and deeds.  Politeness reigned, but politeness is compelled to throw off cloak and jacket when it steps into the arena to meet the encounter of a bull.  Beauchamp drew on their word ‘solidaire’ to assist him in declaring that no civilized nation could be thus independent.  Imagining himself in the France of brave ideas, he contrived to strike out sparks of Legitimist ire around him, and found himself breathing the atmosphere of the most primitive nursery of Toryism.  Again he encountered the shrug, and he would have it a verbal matter.  M. d’Orbec gravely recited the programme of the country party in France.  M. Livret carried the war across Channel.  You English have retired from active life, like the exhausted author, to turn critic—­the critic that sneers:  unless we copy you abjectly we are execrable.  And what is that sneer?  Materially it is an acrid saliva, withering where it drops; in the way of fellowship it is a corpse-emanation.  As to wit, the sneer is the cloak of clumsiness; it is the Pharisee’s incense, the hypocrite’s pity, the post of exaltation of the fat citizen, etc.; but, said M. Livret, the people using it should have a care that they keep powerful:  they make no friends.  He terminated with this warning to a nation not devoid of superior merit.  M. d’Orbec said less, and was less consoled by his outburst.

In the opinion of Mr. Vivian Ducie, present at the discussion, Beauchamp provoked the lash; for, in the first place, a beautiful woman’s apparent favourite should be particularly discreet in all that he says:  and next, he should have known that the Gallic shrug over matters political is volcanic—­it is the heaving of the mountain, and, like the proverbial Russ, leaps up Tartarly at a scratch.  Our newspapers also had been flea-biting M. Livret and his countrymen