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Post by schlager7 on Dec 30, 2006 10:54:30 GMT -6
from TIME magazine Monday, Mar. 23, 1925
A Duel
For some time Lucien Gaudin, said to be the world's greatest swordsman, and Armand Massard, 1920 Olympic epée champion, have been getting cooler and cooler toward each other.
It was nothing more than professional jealousy.
Early one bright, cold morning, the two principals and their seconds met for combat. The two men stripped, whipped out their swords, stood face to face.
There was a sharp "Engages!" and the two pieces of steel began to grind and clash.
The contest was short. M. Massard, the challenger, flicked a small wound in the sword hand of his opponent. Three doctors fled into the field, declared the wound slight, but Gaudin could not continue.
Honor was satisfied.
Three days later, M. Gaudin met Charles Delporte of Belgium at Brussels, defeated him in a fencing match 12 to 4 points.
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Post by fox on Dec 30, 2006 12:00:37 GMT -6
Interesting. I knew both Giorgio Santelli and Aldo Nadi, among Olympic types, had been involved in duels.
If I recall correctly, Gaudin defeated Nadi (who blamed the referees) one time and, thereafter, refused all of Nadi's attempts to goad him into a rematch. Reading Nadi's autobiography, it seems to have stuck in his craw for much of his later life.
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Post by Aldo N on Dec 31, 2006 8:35:54 GMT -6
Seems a larger percentage of early 20th century fencers were also duelists than I would have thought.
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Post by schlager7 on Jan 1, 2007 8:10:44 GMT -6
This short tidbit from the same magazine 13 months later may show one reason dueling declined... a changing world.
from TIME magazine
Monday, Apr. 26, 1926
Ignoble Dueling
Orthodox members of the fashionable Parisian Cercle de I' Escrime (Fencing Club) all but wept last week as two of its members settled an affair of honor with four-ounce boxing gloves.
"Duelist" Schapira, a prominent Swiss resident of Paris, easily cuffed into submission his adversary, M. H. Tersieff, a onetime boxing champion of Roumania.
While members of the Cercle were deploring the "execrable dueling form" of both men, a despatch from Bucharest announced a duel still more scandalous.
A young society woman of 18, whose name was deleted by the Hungarian censor, challenged to a duel with sabres a young man of equal rank, who had befouled her name while in his cups.
When they faced each other accompanied by seconds, in a wood near Budapest, he stripped to the waist, according to the Hungarian dueling code, and demanded that she do likewise.
When she refused he laughed, departed.
Vexed, she wept.
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