Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution by Rafael Sabatini (good summer reads TXT) 📕

“Studied?” Andre-Louis was taken aback by the question. “Oh, at Louis Le Grand.”

M. des Amis frowned, looking up sharply as if to see whether his applicant was taking the liberty of amusing himself.

“In Heaven’s name! I am not asking you where you did your humanities, but in what academy you studied fencing.”

“Oh—fencing!” It had hardly ever occurred to Andre-Louis that the sword ranked seriously as a study. “I never studied it very much. I had some lessons in... in the country once.”

The master’s eyebrows went up. “But then?” he cried. “Why trouble to come up two flights of stairs?” He was impatient.

“The notice does not demand a high degree of proficiency. If I am not proficient enough, yet knowing the rudiments I can easily improve. I learn most things readily,” Andre-Louis commended himself. “For the rest: I possess the other qualifications. I am young, as you observe: and I leave you to judge whether I am wrong in assuming that my address is good. I am by profession a man of the robe, though I realize that the motto here is cedat toga armis.”

M. des Amis smiled approvingly. Undoubtedly the young man had a good address, and a certain readiness of wit, it would appear. He ran a critical eye over his physical points. “What is your name?” he asked.

Andre-Louis hesitated a moment. “Andre-Louis,” he said.

The dark, keen eyes conned him more searchingly.

“Well? Andre-Louis what?”

“Just Andre-Louis. Louis is my surname.”

“Oh! An odd surname. You come from Brittany by your accent. Why did you leave it?”

“To save my skin,” he answered, without reflecting. And then made haste to cover the blunder. “I have an enemy,” he explained.

M. des Amis frowned, stroking his square chin. “You ran away?”

“You may say so.

“A coward, eh?”

“I don’t think so.” And then he lied romantically. Surely a man who lived by the sword should have a weakness for the romantic. “You see, my enemy is a swordsman of great strength—the best blade in the province, if not the best blade in France. That is his repute. I thought I would come to Paris to learn something of the art, and then go back and kill him. That, to be frank, is why your notice attracted me. You see, I have not the means to take lessons otherwise. I thought to find work here in the law. But I have failed. There are too many lawyers in Paris as it is, and whilst waiting I have consumed the little money that I had, so that... so that, enfin, your notice seemed to me something to which a special providence had directed me.”

M. des Amis gripped him by the shoulders, and looked into his face.

“Is this true, my friend?” he asked.

“Not a word of it,” said Andre-Louis, wrecking his chances on an irresistible impulse to say the unexpected. But he didn’t wreck them. M. des Amis burst into laughter; and having laughed his fill, confessed himself charmed by his applicant’s fundamental honesty.

“Take off your coat,” he said, “and let us see what you can do. Nature, at least, designed you for a swordsman. You are light, active, and supple, with a good length of arm, and you seem intelligent. I may make something of you, teach you enough for my purpose, which is that you should give the elements of the art to new pupils before I take them in hand to finish them. Let us try. Take that mask and foil, and come over here.”

He led him to the end of the room, where the bare floor was scored with lines of chalk to guide the beginner in the management of his feet.

At the end of a ten minutes’ bout, M. des Amis offered him the situation, and explained it. In addition to imparting the rudiments of the art to beginners, he was to brush out the fencing-room every morning, keep the foils furbished, assist the gentlemen who came for lessons to dress and undress, and make himself generally useful. His wages for the present were to be forty livres a month, and he might sleep in an alcove behind the fencing-room if he had no other lodging.

The position, you see, had its humiliations. But, if Andre-Louis would hope to dine, he must begin by eating his pride as an hors d’oeuvre.

“And so,” he said, controlling a grimace, “the robe yields not only to the sword, but to the broom as well. Be it so. I stay.”

It is characteristic of him that, having made that choice, he should have thrown himself into the work with enthusiasm. It was ever his way to do whatever he did with all the resources of his mind and energies of his body. When he was not instructing very young gentlemen in the elements of the art, showing them the elaborate and intricate salute—which with a few days’ hard practice he had mastered to perfection—and the eight guards, he was himself hard at work on those same guards, exercising eye, wrist, and knees.

Perceiving his enthusiasm, and seeing the obvious possibilities it opened out of turning him into a really effective assistant, M. des Amis presently took him more seriously in hand.

“Your application and zeal, my friend, are deserving of more than forty livres a month,” the master informed him at the end of a week. “For the present, however, I will make up what else I consider due to you by imparting to you secrets of this noble art. Your future depends upon how you profit by your exceptional good fortune in receiving instruction from me.”

Thereafter every morning before the opening of the academy, the master would fence for half an hour with his new assistant. Under this really excellent tuition Andre-Louis improved at a rate that both astounded and flattered M. des Amis. He would have been less flattered and more astounded had he known that at least half the secret of Andre-Louis’ amazing progress lay in the fact that he was devouring the contents of the master’s library, which was made up of a dozen or so treatises on fencing by such great masters as La Bessiere, Danet, and the syndic of the King’s Academy, Augustin Rousseau. To M. des Amis, whose swordsmanship was all based on practice and not at all on theory, who was indeed no theorist or student in any sense, that little library was merely a suitable adjunct to a fencing-academy, a proper piece of decorative furniture. The books themselves meant nothing to him in any other sense. He had not the type of mind that could have read them with profit nor could he understand that another should do so. Andre-Louis, on the contrary, a man with the habit of study, with the acquired faculty of learning from books, read those works with enormous profit, kept their precepts in mind, critically set off those of one master against those of another, and made for himself a choice which he proceeded to put into practice.

At the end of a month it suddenly dawned upon M. des Amis that his assistant had developed into a fencer of very considerable force, a man in a bout with