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By noon the morning's work is over, including the consumption of a cup of soup, the ablution without which no true believer is happy, and the obligations of a Frankish toilet. Then comes a stroll to the fencing-school, kept by an excellent broadswordsman, and old German trooper. For an hour Captain and Mrs.
"Meantime it had grown tolerably light we heard them calling to and fro from the ditch, and just as Allertssohn was turning away, an officer sprang into the meadow, exclaiming: 'Stand, braggart, and draw your blade. "The captain drew his Brescian sword, bowed to his enemy as if he were in the fencing-school, bent the steel and closed with the Castilian.
"Perhaps so; but I beg you to remember the Rhine, the Meuse, and our other rivers, even the Marne, Drecht and whatever the smaller streams are called. They remain full and bear stately ships at all seasons of the year. Uniform and reliable is the custom of this country; to-day one way, to-morrow another, is the Italian habit. It's just the same with the blades in the fencing-school."
He pushed this open, and found himself in a sparsely furnished, untenanted antechamber. From a room beyond, the door of which was closed, came the stamping of feet, the click and slither of steel upon steel, and dominating these sounds a vibrant sonorous voice speaking a language that was certainly French; but such French as is never heard outside a fencing-school. "Coulez!
Sperver sprang from his seat and ran out upon the platform to see if a wolf had dropped into the moat. But no the howling came from neither. Then turning to us he cried "Fritz! Sébalt! come, come quickly!" We flew down the steps four at a time and rushed into the fencing-school.
Nothing in her demeanor betrayed the faintest shade of emotion; but I remembered the old maxim of the fencing-school "Watch your enemy's eyes, not his blade;" and I caught Flora's, as she raised her head after returning our salutation, before she had time to discipline them thoroughly. I saw them glitter with defiant hatred as they lighted on her rival.
My Herdegen had mingled with this wondrous fellowship arrayed as a knight crusader leading three captive Saracen princes; namely, the two young Masters Loffelholz and Schlebitzer, who had stirred him to dress in the fencing-school, mounted on horses, and between them my squire Akusch on the bear-leader's camel, all in white as a Son of the Desert; and the three of them fettered with chains made of wood.
If the bee were seized in the inverse position, or if the sting were to go slightly astray, the results would be totally different; the sting, penetrating the bee in a downward direction, would poison the first thoracic ganglion and provoke a partial paralysis only. What art, to destroy a miserable bee! In what fencing-school did the slayer learn that terrible upward thrust beneath the chin?
One of the principal cartoonists of the Charivari at that moment was "Cham," otherwise the Vicomte Amedee de Noe, an old friend of my family's. It was he, by the way, who before the war insisted on my going to a fencing-school, saying: "Look here, if you mean to live in France and be a journalist, you must know how to hold a sword. Come with me to Ruze's.
This is the same thing as to be the most expert in a fencing-school, and to fear the thrust of an unskilful person who never handled a foil.
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