as soon as your glass was empty, he was there with a splash. But the Count wasn’t sure why he was choosing this particular moment to offer a hand.
“With your jacket,” the bartender clarified.
In point of fact, the Count did seem to be struggling to get his arm through the sleeve of his blazer—which he couldn’t quite remember having taken off in the first place. The Count had arrived at the Shalyapin at six o’clock, as usual, where he maintained a strict limit of one aperitif before dinner. But noting that he had never received his bottle of Baudelaire, the Count had allowed himself a second glass of Dubonnet. And then a snifter or two of brandy. And the next thing he knew, it was . . . , it was . . .
“What time is it, Audrius?”
“Ten, Your Excellency.”
“Ten!”
Audrius, who was suddenly on the customer side of the bar, was helping the Count off his stool. And as he guided the Count across the lobby (quite unnecessarily), the Count invited him into his train of thought.
“Did you know, Audrius, that when dueling was first discovered by the Russian officer corps in the early 1700s, they took to it with such enthusiasm that the Tsar had to forbid the practice for fear that there would soon be no one left to lead his troops.”
“I did not know that, Your Excellency,” the bartender replied with a smile.
“Well, it’s quite true. And not only is a duel central to the action of Onegin, one occurs at a critical juncture in War and Peace, Fathers and Sons, and The Brothers Karamazov! Apparently, for all their powers of invention, the Russian masters could not come up with a better plot device than two central characters resolving a matter of conscience by means of pistols at thirty-two paces.”
“I see your point. But here we are. Shall I press for the fifth floor?”
The Count, who found himself standing in front of the elevator, looked at the bartender in shock.
“But, Audrius, I have never taken the lift in my life!”
Then, after patting the bartender on the shoulder, the Count began winding his way up the stairs; that is, until he reached the second-floor landing, where he sat on a step.
“Why is it that our nation above all others embraced the duel so wholeheartedly?” he asked the stairwell rhetorically.
Some, no doubt, would simply dismiss it as a by-product of barbarism. Given Russia’s long, heartless winters, its familiarity with famine, its rough sense of justice, and so on, and so on, it was perfectly natural for its gentry to adopt an act of definitive violence as the means of resolving disputes. But in the Count’s considered opinion, the reason that dueling prevailed among Russian gentlemen stemmed from nothing more than their passion for the glorious and grandiose.
True, duels were fought by convention at dawn in isolated locations to ensure the privacy of the gentlemen involved. But were they fought behind ash heaps or in scrapyards? Of course not! They were fought in a clearing among the birch trees with a dusting of snow. Or on the banks of a winding rivulet. Or at the edge of a family estate where the breezes shake the blossoms from the trees. . . . That is, they were fought in settings that one might have expected to see in the second act of an opera.
In Russia, whatever the endeavor, if the setting is glorious and the tenor grandiose, it will have its adherents. In fact, over the years, as the locations for duels became more picturesque and the pistols more finely manufactured, the best-bred men proved willing to defend their honor over lesser and lesser offenses. So while dueling may have begun as a response to high crimes—to treachery, treason, and adultery—by 1900 it had tiptoed down the stairs of reason, until they were being fought over the tilt of a hat, the duration of a glance, or the placement of a comma.
In the old and well-established code of dueling, it is understood that the number of paces the offender and offended take before shooting should be in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the insult. That is, the most reprehensible affront should be resolved by a duel of the fewest paces, to ensure that one of the two men will not leave the field of honor alive. Well, if that was the case, concluded the Count, then in the new era, the duels should have been fought at no less than