At the second assault, near Adinkerke, Lieutenant Chapuis received the blow that was to cost him his life. As to the motion that immediately preceded the thrust, the testimonies diverged: two of Chapuis’s seconds declared that Eugène Dekeirel’s left hand had parried or seized the foil; the merchant’s companions could not confirm this version, while the physician was unable to specify what his eyes had caught. The fatal wound itself was beyond dispute. At Douai, the jurors returned a verdict of not guilty on both criminal counts.
The drama had its origin during the night of Mardi Gras, 1885, at the Café du Sac in Dunkirk. The retrospective chronicle of the Pitaval sets the scene at approximately four o’clock in the morning. Several officers were seated together, among them Captain Picard and Chapuis, a lieutenant in mufti belonging to the 110th Infantry Regiment; at other tables sat young men of commerce, including Eugène Dekeirel. The latter’s younger brother, Gaston, entered the establishment accompanied by a masked singer attired in a blue domino. Chapuis rose from his seat and joined the company of the merchants.
According to the chronicler, the lieutenant bantered with the young woman, bade her show her teeth, and then leaned close to whisper in her ear. She took no apparent offense and retorted jestingly to the waiter. Dekeirel, however, judged that this stranger was addressing his brother’s companion with an unseemly familiarity. He requested that he leave her in peace. Chapuis replied that he was lacking in breeding; Dekeirel, wounded in turn by the affront, offered to settle the matter on the field.
The dispute might well have ended there. Captain Picard recognized Dekeirel, whom he regarded as an amiable man, and interposed his authority. He observed that the license of carnival might excuse words that would otherwise be out of place, and he urged Chapuis to express his regrets if he had overstepped the bounds. The two men stepped outside, exchanged a few words, and shook hands. According to the account Dekeirel later gave before the court, Chapuis expressed regret for having addressed him so roughly and protested that he had intended no offense. The reconciliation appeared complete.
It was at that juncture that Gaston Dekeirel, who had overheard a fragment of the conversation, reopened the quarrel. He maintained that Chapuis had just denied ever having offered an apology. The lieutenant confirmed that he had retracted an offensive expression, but denied having begged pardon and declared he would never do so. Thereupon Eugène Dekeirel demanded a written apology; failing which, he insisted upon fighting on the morrow. Picard attempted no second mediation. The Pitaval attributes a measure of this failure to the exhaustion and agitation of the night—a reflection belonging to its own commentary, rather than to any judicial finding.
On February 18, two officers, Lieutenants Baubouin and Guillonnet, met with Dekeirel’s representatives: the merchant Bates and Heyße, manager of a branch of the Crédit Lyonnais. The latter maintained that their principal had suffered an insult and initially proposed pistols. Chapuis’s seconds deemed such an arm disproportionate to a quarrel born of mere words, but made it known that should pistols be chosen, their comrade would not fire into the air: he would insist upon revolvers, six exchanges of shots, twenty-five paces, advance at will, and the liberty to take aim. Dekeirel’s seconds declined such terms. The parties ultimately agreed upon the foil, the combat to continue until one of the adversaries was incapacitated.
The chronicle relates that Dekeirel repented of the bargain: he would have preferred the pistol, which he deemed less hazardous. The chronicler counters that a bout with foils of this nature was not considered a duel to the death in France; such an appraisal does not, however, diminish the genuine peril of the chosen weapons.
On the following day, February 19, the parties repaired to Belgian territory, close by the frontier, in the vicinity of Adinkerke. The seconds and an army surgeon accompanied them. Lots were drawn for ground and weapons; Dekeirel, according to the report, obtained the more advantageous position. The combatants stripped to their shirts and trousers. Chapuis asked leave to retain a narrow leather belt that supported his trousers, which was granted. These particulars were subsequently introduced into the court proceedings to establish the circumstances of the encounter, though they could not by themselves prove an intent to kill.
At the first assault, Dekeirel pressed the attack. After several passes, Chapuis claimed to have touched him in the leg. Dekeirel denied it. He lowered his trousers, and the surgeon examined his flesh: no mark was to be seen. The Pitaval reports that the accused then suspected Chapuis of wishing to assure himself that no coat of mail was concealed beneath his garments. The duel was resumed.
The second pass was of such swiftness that the recollections of those present were sharply divided. Baubouin, a second to Chapuis, declared that he saw Dekeirel’s left hand leave his back and strike the opposing blade to beat it aside, at the very moment the merchant delivered his thrust with the right. He believed that the lieutenant would otherwise have wounded his adversary. In his view, the maneuver was clean contrary to the rules of honor. Guillonnet, Chapuis’s other second, affirmed that Dekeirel had seized the lieutenant’s foil with his left hand before running him through below the breast; he likewise judged the act unlawful and the thrust premeditated.
Dekeirel’s seconds did not corroborate this interpretation. Heyße saw the hand move, but believed that any contact with the steel was unintentional. Bates could not affirm that Dekeirel had either touched or grasped the weapon; he described an involuntary movement, born of the sudden confusion of close quarters. The military surgeon, who had caught sight of a motion of the left hand, could not specify its precise nature. The chronicle accuses no witness of perjury; yet their depositions fail to establish the exact trajectory of either arm.
Chapuis was gravely injured in the liver. The report attributes to him an instantaneous reaction: he reproached Dekeirel with having held his foil and denounced the blow as murder. Dekeirel immediately protested the charge. He, too, bore a slight wound upon the left forefinger. To the defense, this proved that his hand had encountered the blade in a reflexive parry; to the prosecution, it supported the contention of a deliberate contact with the sword. Three physicians subsequently debated the form and location of the lesion. They judged that the edge of the weapon had cut the finger, but their opinions did not demonstrate that the entire hand had grasped the blade.
Chapuis succumbed several days later. His death did not dispel the uncertainty surrounding the gesture that had preceded the fatal stroke, and it was precisely upon this uncertainty that the trial was fought. Dekeirel was arraigned before the Assize Court of Douai during the last week of May 1885, under an indictment for murder which, according to the account, was amended during the course of the hearings. The question was not merely whether his foil had dealt Chapuis a mortal wound—the thrust was not in dispute. The court had to determine whether he had deliberately parried his adversary’s weapon in defiance of an agreed or recognized rule, and whether such a breach could warrant a criminal conviction.
The fencing masters were divided upon the employment of the left hand. Some condemned its use to turn aside the point before lunging; others maintained that an instinctive defensive parry was recognized in several traditions of swordsmanship. The problem reached beyond technical treatises: if the code of the duel enjoyed no universal sanction, how could a willful transgression be proved?
Paul de Cassagnac and Anatole de la Forge, whose opinions had circulated prior to the trial, advocated a rigorous interpretation: to employ the disengaged hand to deflect a sword rendered the combat unfair, if not homicidal. Other masters contended that an involuntary parry must not be confounded with a calculated maneuver. As for the medical men, they could well describe a lacerated finger, but they could not, of their own knowledge, reconstruct the motion of the combatants. The chronicler rehearses these several voices and then unhesitatingly decides in Dekeirel’s favor—a conclusion that belongs to the Pitaval and must not be mistaken for the impartial judgment of history.
The prosecution relied upon the testimonies of Baubouin and Guillonnet, upon the dying declaration of Chapuis, and upon the pronouncements of those masters of fence who interdicted the left hand. The defense urged the suddenness of the onslaught, the irreconcilable versions of the seconds, the absence of an established common rule, and the likelihood of a protective reflex. It submitted further that the wound upon Dekeirel’s finger was wholly compatible with a sharp brush against the steel, without proving that he had gripped it so as to render Chapuis defenseless.
Two questions were submitted to the jury: Had Dekeirel committed murder? Failing that, had he willfully struck blows or inflicted wounds upon Chapuis, occasioning his death? According to the chronicle, the jurors returned after a quarter of an hour and answered both questions in the negative. The verdict was therefore an acquittal. The Annuaire du duel of 1891 confirms the fatal meeting of February 19, but offers no particulars as to the judgment of the court.
Thus the affair does not establish that Dekeirel’s movement was undeniably involuntary; it demonstrates only that the jury rejected both murder and intentional assault within the strict framework of the questions placed before them. The Pitaval converts this outcome into a plea against the duel: where the rules are unsettled, it suggests, they cannot serve to punish a man for a deliberate fault which the trial failed to prove. Yet such reasoning leaves untouched that simpler, more terrible inquiry: why two men, after a midnight quarrel in a café and a miscarried reconciliation, should have deemed it their duty to submit their honor to the point of the sword.