Some French Duels

The most prosaic, the most bourgeois, of all eminent French statesmen and historians, the late M. Adolphe Thiers, fonght a duel when a yonng man with the irate father of a pretty girl whom Thiers, while anxious to rnarry, did not wed, because he was too poor to support her. Shots were exchanged without results, aud the coinbatants embraced. The famous journalist and litterateur, M. Emile de Girardin, editor of La Presse, fought four duels in 1834 with the editora of other Parisian journals because, the aunual subseription of French daily newspapers being at that time at 80 francs, he had reduced the price of La Presse by one-half, with the resnlt that the circulation of his paper was enormously increased. In the last of these duels he had the misfortune to kill Armand Carrel, a man of talent and a popular idol. Girardin, who was shot in the hip, had lingered between life and death for weeks before he recovered from his wound, and never, in spite of repeated provocatiotis, could be induced to fight another duel. "Dueling, " he eaid, "is a fault of our education against which our intelligence protests." But in France you must have killed youx