Secrets of the Sword

THE Baron de Bazancourt's book "Les Secrets de l'Epee" is one of the most interesting contributions made in modern times to the literature of the white arm. Nowadays when the beautiful and useful art of fencing and sword-play is beginning, has well begun one might even say, to attract the attention which not very long ago it vainly asked for in England, it certainly seems high time for an English translation of so remarkable a work. The occasion then has come and found a writer ready for it. To what extent he has shown himself, as Shagpat had it, "master of an event" shall be presently discussed. The Baron de Bazancourt's book was published by Amyot 8 Rue de la Paix Paris in 1862 and reproduced by the same firm in 1876. The Baron, who died in 1865, was well known in Paris society and also well known to a wider public by works on the campaigns in the Crimea, Italy, Mexico, and Cochin China. His book on the secrets of the sword was and is noteworthy in many ways. If paradoxically inclined one might say that "Les Secrets de l'Epee" was written to prove that there are no such secrets, which, of course, so far as regards all once vaunted "secret thrusts" is but a platitude. The Baron's aim however was, as he himself said plainly enough, to tear away certain superfluous trappings of pedantic nomenclature along with what he regarded as a kind of official red-tapeism on the part of too many of the professors of his day. In the record of one of the charming evenings of conversation in which be expounded his views to a listening circle he laid it down that there was no more difficulty about learning to fence or handle a dueling-sword as a man of the world should do than there was about learning to ride as a man of the world should ride. He admitted fully, and the admission has been too much passed over, carelessly or not, by some of his critics, that to attain to the very first rank as a fencer and swordsman demanded unremitting study and practice allied to a natural disposition for the science-as much study and practice indeed as go to make a professor's reputation. On the other hand he contended that many a promising pupil was put off from pursuing his studies not only by needless convolution and even confusion in technical phrases, but also by being kept far too long at the work of repeating attacks and defences, thrusts and parries, at the master's orders without ever being allowed to try his skill and, so to speak, feel his feet in loose play. There is some truth in this now and there must have been a good deal of truth in it when the Baron wrote in 1862. The best masters even now are apt to keep a pupil, who has long ago stepped into the arena of loose play, so long at a lesson, unless he himself can find a polite excuse for cutting it short, that, when after the lesson, he encounters an adversary, his mind and body are both in a condition short of the fresh vigour to be desired whether he does or does not meet a foeman worthy or more than worthy of his steel. -"The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science & Art," Vol. 91 [1901]"