"You will tell me that my comment is too grave for my text, but you
know as well as I do that small things and great are linked together by
bonds, which may be invisible but are none the less real."
"Every age," remarked one of my friends, "has its own manners and
customs. We no longer live in the days when every gentleman carried a
sword at his side and as a matter of course knew how to use it. The
taste for fencing is not so universal that we are all impatient to be
initiated into its inmost mysteries. Some of us may not have sufficient
leisure or sufficient inclination; we are too busy or too lazy. I
believe that what most men think about it can be put in a very few
words:--'_We don't want to fight but_--if we must, we should like to be
able to show our teeth and fight like gentlemen,' that is all that the
average man wants with fencing."
"Quite right," chimed in the Vicomte de G. with a laugh, "we only want
just so much of it as will serve our private ends."
"All that you say," I continued, "is true, but it is not the whole
truth, as you would readily admit if you paid a visit to one of the
fencing rooms of Paris. If you happened, for instance, to drop in on
my friend and esteemed master, M. Pons, you would find a gathering of
amateurs, who are devoted to the practice of arms, who keep up the
traditions with taste and culture, and understand thoroughly well how a
sword ought to be used.
"But, to be quite fair, I must hasten to add that the prowess
and prestige of these brilliant players would not suffer by the
simplification of sword-play. The point I wish to make is that a
treatise on fencing for the use of gentlemen, who have so little time
to spare and so much to waste, is a book to be written, a book of real
utility and importance, and indeed almost indispensable. I have put my
finger on a felt want, and if you will allow me I will briefly explain
how I think such a book ought to be written, and what it ought to
teach. I know, of course, that I shall be violently contradicted, but
after all--I know that I am on the right track.