victim to a "question of shop" of which
he allowed himself, though perhaps not deliberately, to become the
champion. After many attempts, more or less successful, in the way of
popular journalism, M. de Girardin, in 1836, started _La Presse_, a
serious journal of the same size as the then existing ones, but at half
the subscription of the latter, all of which absolutely banded at once
against him. Armand Carrel, who was a soldier, and a valiant soldier, a
writer of talent, and a gentleman to boot, ought to have stood aloof
from that kind of polemics. Emile de Girardin was not the likely man to
submit to open or implied insult. His best, albeit his least-known book,
"Emile," which is as it were an autobiography, had given the measure of
his thoughts on the subject of duelling. "Emile" goes into society as a
soldier would go into an enemy's country. Not that he is by nature cruel
or bloodthirsty, but he knows that, to hold his own, he must be always
ready, not only for defence, but for attack.

"The secret one is bound to preserve with regard to the preparations for
a meeting, and those preparations themselves are simply horrible. The
care, the precautions to be taken, the secret which is not to leak out,
all these are very like the preparations for a crime," he says.
"Nevertheless," he goes on, "the horror of all this disappears, when the
man, impelled by hatred or resentment, is thirsting for revenge; but
when the heart is absolutely without gall, and when the imagination is
still subject to all the softer emotions, then, in order not to recoil
with fear at the ever horrible idea of a duel, a man must be imbued with
all the force of a prejudice which resists the very laws that condemn
it."

It was under the latter circumstances that M. de Girardin confronted his
adversary. The two men had probably never exchanged a word with one
another, they felt no personal animosity; nay, more, the duel was not an
_inevitable_ one; and yet it cost one man his life, and burthened the
other with lifelong regrets.

Had the issue been different, _La Presse_ would probably have
disappeared, and all recrimination ceased. As it was, unable to goad M.
de Girardin into a reversal of his decision "never to go out again," and
that in spite of nine years of direct insult from a so-called political
party, of every kind of quasi-legal vexation, M. de Beauvallon
constituted himself a second Armand Carrel, selecting Dujarrier as his
victim, the c