The DuelI am glad, in all the inward horror which on account of the course of this history dwells in my heart, that M. Feirefitz, in that interview with M. Poitevin, had asked for certainty about the genuineness of Grigorss’s knighthood, whereby he loosened the magistrate’s tongue and made him give the details of his guest’s daring single-handed sally on the bridge. We should probably never otherwise have heard of this adventure. Lyrical exaggerations willingly discounted, which in the heat of the narration escaped the teller and which at need are pardonable in one unpractised in factual narration—still enough remains to assure us that the knightly dreams of the cloister scholar from the fisherman’s hut were not empty vaporing, but rather that the language of knighthood, of which he assert
