You are skilled with the pistol, and all the chances are in your favor."

So they parted... and the Viscount returned to his house to wait for them. Hardly had his agitation left him

for a moment before it returned afresh. His limbs trembled. He could not endure keeping still. His mouth went dry and his gaze grew fixed... He wished to take some food, but he could not. There stirred in his mind the idea of drinking spirits, for they would put courage into him, and he said to himself:

"I have found the remedy... Things will go as I desire." But his agitation came back upon him, and he felt a mad urge to fling himself on the ground, to scream, and to bite.

Night let down its curtains... And at the sound of the ringing bell he felt he did not possess his full strength to rise and receive his two seconds; he was unable to offer them a greeting... or even to utter a single letter, lest they discover the trembling of his voice. The Colonel said:

"Everything has been arranged as you wish. Your adversary at first claimed to enjoy all the privileges belonging to the offended party, but in the end he bowed to your conditions and accepted them. As for his seconds, they are two military men."

The Viscount said:

"Thank you..."

The Marquis added:

"We must look for a doctor, since the duel is not to end until one of you falls... and for a spot near a house to which the wounded man may be carried if need be."

The Colonel asked the Viscount:

"Do you feel calm?"

"Yes... thank you."

The two men withdrew. And when he found himself alone once more, he felt as though he had been struck mad... His servant had lit the lamps, and the Viscount sat down at the table to write some letters. But when his pen had traced at the top of the letter "This is my will," he sprang shuddering from his seat, feeling himself incapable of forming any idea or of doing anything at all...

So he was going to fight... he could not avoid entering the contest. He wanted to fight — that had been his decision and his desire; and yet, in spite of all this, he felt that his strength had failed and that he was incapable of walking, or of standing, on the dueling ground. From time to time his teeth chattered with an audible sound. He tried to read... and took up Châteauvillard's book on the principles and rules of dueling. And he kept asking himself:

"Is my adversary a skilled duelist? Is he known? How am I to find that out?" He suddenly remem-bered de Vaux's book on the most famous marksmen, and went at once to his library, took down the book, and leafed through the whole of it — but the name of Georges Lamil was not to be found. And yet — is it conceivable that the man would accept his challenge and consent to fight him if he were not skilled in the use of the pistol?

He opened one of the cases and took from it a pistol, gripped it in the correct hold for firing, and raised his arm... But he felt the tremor running through his body, and he said, addressing himself:

"It is beyond me to fight in this condition."

He contemplated the mouth of the pistol's muzzle... that muzzle which spits forth death; then he thought of the disgrace that would fasten upon him... the stinging whispers in society... the laughter of mockery in the clubs,

the affronts that would be heaped on him by the ladies, the digs the journalists would publish... and the insults the cowards would pin upon him. He went back to exam-ining the pistol and contemplating it — and how great was his delight when he discovered that, by chance, the pistol was loaded.

He opened his mouth, placed the muzzle of the pistol in it, and pressed the trigger... And when his servant came running at the sound of the shot, he found him a lifeless corpse, without motion. There was a thread of blood that had stained a white sheet of paper on which was written:

"This is my will."

within it and the world around it; a nation that has won independence and so learned the meaning of inde-pendence; a nation pierced through by the rays of liberty, which did not stop at matter and body but passed beyond them to soul and spirit; a nation whose people's hearts have been filled with a faith of which every grain moves mountains, and upon whose men's and women's brows a light has risen, every spark of which guides the generations.