Strange Times 85: Duelling Proved Nothing & Was Silly

Thank you for indulging me during my five week hiatus—the time proved invaluable both for finishing rewrites on the sequel to Westside, which is already available for preorder (hot damn!), and taking several naps.

As an experiment to see if I can attract a few more subscribers to the full newsletter, I’m running a special this week offering a year’s subscription for just $20. Get it while you can! Or don’t! Those are your options!

Today brings a picky mercenary bride and a brace of furious French deputies. Snap your cane over your rival’s head for… 

March 26, 1921

• An Inwood daycare owner is indicted for cruelty to children after one of her charges accuses her of covering him with a soiled sheet and tying him to a post in the back yard as punishment.

• Although his convalescence continues happily, Caruso cancels his planned trip to Atlantic City so that he may sail for Italy as early as May. 

• The Weather: Partly cloudy today; Sunday, Cloudy, with occasional showers; moderate temperature; south winds. 

I am so disappointed that they chose not to quote from the too passionate and extravagant expressions of love.

TRENTON, N.J., March 25.—Dorothy Miller, the sixteen-year-old Trenton girl who has offered to marry any refined, educated white man who will give her mother $1,000 for a vitally important operation, today rejected the Philadelphia young man to whom she wired yesterday that he would do. This suitor, whose name the girl withheld, called on her today, but the interview was short.

“He was too tough,” she said, “and I turned him down. He was impossible.”

The young man told her that he owned a garage and had an income of $600 a month.

Miss Miller today received a letter from a Spanish instructor, but his expressions of love were so passionate and extravagant that she said she did not want to meet him.

Unquestionably, the best detail in this amazing little story is that the Royalist aggressor was dragged away screaming is own name. “Daudet! Daudet! Daudet!”

PARIS, March 25.—“Who struck first?” is the question which a Magistrate is likely to have some difficulty in deciding in his judgment on a fight between the Royalist Deputy, Léon Daudet, and Jacques Fieschi, ex-Colonial administrator, which disturbed the peace of the aristocratic boulevard, St. Germain, yesterday afternoon.

M. Daudet in his paper, L’Action Française, says this morning that the other man assaulted him with his stick. The Republican press, which habitually refers to the Royalist Deputy as “The King’s Jester,” roundly declares that all the witnesses of the affair are agreed that it was M. Daudet who first used his stick and drew blood.

M. Daudet was on his way from his home to the Chamber of Deputies when the encounter took place. His own story is that he saw three men standing on the sidewalk as if waiting for some one, and when he approached one of them, Fieschi, called out: “There’s that miserable Daudet, the public insulter!” The reference was evidently to the Royalist’s habit of attacking him and other political enemies in his newspaper in somewhat unconventional language and with little regard for their feelings.

“At the same time,” writes M. Daudet, “my aggressor dealt a blow with his cane at me from which my hat saved me. I replied vigorously.”

So vigorous, indeed, was his reply that he laid open his opponent’s forehead, and blood flowed freely. A crowd collected while the two continued their furious battle of walking sticks, and it was only after considerable mutual damage had been done that M. Daudet was dragged off, shouting his own name and declaring that the whole affair was an ambush. After their wounds had been attended in a drug store both parties lodged complaints with the local police magistrate.

So violent, according to one account, were the blows which the stout Royalist administered that in the end he broke his cane on his adversary. With M. Fieschi at the time were two men whose names M. Daudet says were Sternberg and Oppenheim. He declares that the affair was the outcome of a speech which he had made at the morning session of the Chamber on the Caillaux affair.

Recently M. Daudet was challenged to a duel by one man whom he had ben attacking, but declined to fight on the ground that duelling proved nothing and was silly. As he has in the past fought several serious duels, his courage, at least, cannot be questioned.