that you should first do so. Since that is accomplished, why, here's to make an end."
He went in with lightning rapidity. For a moment his point seemed to La Tour d'Azyr to be everywhere at once, and then from a low engagement in sixte, André-Louis stretched forward with swift and vigorous ease to lunge in tierce. He drove his point to transfix his opponent whom a series of calculated disengages uncovered in that line. But to his amazement and chagrin, La Tour d'Azyr parried the stroke; infinitely more to his chagrin La Tour d'Azyr parried it just too late. Had he completely parried it, all would yet have been well. But striking the blade in the last fraction of a second, the Marquis deflected the point from the line of his body, yet not so completely but that a couple of feet of that hard-driven steel tore through the muscles of his sword-arm.
To the seconds none of these details had been visible. All that they had seen had been a swift whirl of flashing blades, and then André-Louis stretched almost to the ground in an upward lunge that had pierced the Marquis' right arm just below the shoulder.
The sword fell from the suddenly relaxed grip of La Tour d'Azyr's fingers, which had been rendered powerless, and he stood now disarmed, his lip in his teeth, his face white, his chest heaving, before his opponent, who had at once recovered. With the blood-tinged tip of his sword resting on the ground, André-Louis surveyed him grimly, as we survey the prey that through our own clumsiness has escaped us at the last moment.
In the Assembly and in the newspapers this might be hailed as another victory for the paladin of the Third Estate; only himself could know the extent and the bitternest of the failure.
M. d'Ormesson had sprung to the side of his principal.
"You are hurt!" he had cried stupidly.
"It is nothing," said La Tour d'Azyr. "A scratch." But his lip writhed, and the torn sleeve of his fine cambric shirt was full of blood.
