By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  The search for the unbeatable action never ends. Several leading fencers have developed “signature moves,” the 1963 world épée champion, Roland Losert, for instance, making two beats on the outside of his opponent’s blade, feinting to make a third, then, as his adversary disengaged, blocking the blade and hitting in the low line. The great Eduardo Mangiarotti liked to make a false attack to the inside of his opponent’s arm, parry by quarte-counterquarte, then flèche-riposte underneath his opponent’s wrist. His publicity postcard shows him consummating such a move. The 1976 world youth foil champion, a left-handed South Londoner, delivered ripostes from behind his right ear. And the film actor Bruce Lee, who studied fencing and boxing as well as other martial arts, synthesized what he judged the best elements into a system all his own: “Jeet Kune Do” (“the intercepting fist,” his translation of fencing’s “stop-hit”).‡

  The “behind the back” move, as advertised in Angelo’s famous treatise on fencing. Despite the book’s success, the move was still taught as a “botte secrète.” (illustration credit 6.2)

  The nineteenth-century French philologist Emile Littré considered a botte secrète as no more than “an attack that one’s adversary does not know how to parry.” By the eighteenth century most masters knew that the philosopher’s stone was also a chimera and instead concentrated on creating as complete a system as they could so that each of their pupils could select the appropriate sequence of feints and thrusts to defeat a particular opponent.

  But perfect thrusts and secret moves were notions too romantic to disappear completely. In 1921 Rafael Sabatini, an Italian living in Liverpool, published Scaramouche, with its famous first line “He was born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad.” The story tracks the adventures of a young actor, André-Louis Moreau, who vows to avenge his best friend, killed by an accomplished swordsman, and sets himself to outmatch him. He applies to one Bertrand des Amis, “Maître en fait d’Armes des Académies du Roi.”

  Bertrand (the real name of three generations of French masters who settled in London; Sabatini is paying a private hommage) is a famous teacher who agrees to take André-Louis on as pupil and part-time help. He also shows him his extensive fencing library. André-Louis duly scours it and after two months of intense immersion makes a discovery:

  Swordsmanship as he learnt and taught and saw it daily practised consisted of a series of attacks and parries, a series of disengages from one line into another. But always a limited series. A half-dozen disengages on either side was, strictly speaking, usually as far as any engagement went. Then one recommenced. But even so, these disengages were fortuitous. What if from first to last they should be calculated?

  He sets about testing his theory against an opponent at the salle and is delighted at its success: “In a burst of mingled generosity and intoxication, André-Louis was almost for disclosing his method—a method which a little later was to become a commonplace of the fencing-rooms. Betimes he checked himself. To reveal his secret would be to destroy the prestige that must accrue to him from exercising it.” Instead, he goes back to honing his new skills, until at last he is ready to take on his teacher.

  The master set himself to exert all his skill against his assistant. But today it availed him nothing before André-Louis’s imperious attacks. After the third hit, M. des Amis stepped back and pulled off his mask. “What’s this?” he asked. He was pale, and his dark brows were contracted in a frown. Not for years had he been so wounded in his self-love. “Have you been taught a secret botte?”

  He had always boasted that he knew too much about the sword to believe any nonsense about secret bottes; but this performance of André-Louis’ had shaken his convictions on that score.7

  One can almost picture Sabatini, over several nights’ enthusiastic argument at Félix Bertrand’s salle, going over his ideas for how his hero would overcome the murderer. We shall see the outcome of André-Louis’s secret moves in Chapter 13, but for Sabatini the perfect thrust was the ability to think well ahead of one’s opponent: perfect because secret—or at least hidden from the one person who matters, the adversary.

  IN 1999, JUST AS THE FILM OF LE BOSSU CAME OUT, ANOTHER FILM appeared with the same theme: The Fencing Master, adapted from the novel by the Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte.8 Once more, a master possesses a perfect thrust and must use it to conquer his enemies.

  However, The Fencing Master is far more ambitious and explores the notion of whether it is possible to create a fencing system that deals with every eventuality. It is set in 1868, a time of revolution in Madrid, where Don Jaime Astarloa, aged fifty-six, maintains his salle. He is a traditionalist, a private man who avoids politics and who has lived alone ever since a failed love affair of his youth. His social life is restricted to the local coffeehouse, where he idly listens to his friends discuss whether Queen Isabella II will be overthrown.

  Besides his work as a master he is trying to complete his life’s ambition, a massive “Treatise on the Art of Fencing.” Don Jaime reflects:

  Lately … he had begun to have serious doubts about his ability to set down on paper the discipline to which he had dedicated his whole life. There was another factor, too, which only added to his unease. If the work was to be the ne plus ultra on the subject he hoped it would be, it was essential that it deliver a master stroke, the perfect unstoppable thrust, the purest creation of human talent, a model of inspiration and efficacy.

  Thus the two ideas are yoked together: the perfect system must include a masterstroke. Don Jaime’s ruminations are disrupted by an unexpected visitor. A strikingly beautiful young woman, Adela de Otero, appeals to him to teach her; more, she will pay a large sum if he will submit to yet a further request:

  “I have made all the necessary inquiries,” she said calmly, “and I was told you were the best fencing master in Madrid. The last of the old school, they say. I was also told that you are the inventor of a famous, secret thrust, which you are willing to teach to interested pupils.… I wish to hire your services.”

  At first the master refuses—he has never taught a woman—but he is smitten by her beauty, and when she picks up a foil from his salle they engage in an impromptu lesson. She is an excellent fencer; intrigued, he agrees to take her on. But her priorities are clear:

  “ ‘They say that this secret thrust of yours is impossible to parry.’ Don Jaime gave a modest smile. ‘They exaggerate, madam. Once you know it, parrying it is the simplest thing in the world. I have yet to discover the unstoppable thrust.’ ” Nevertheless she perseveres, and he teaches her the secret move. She quickly masters it, right down to the final action—a fatal thrust to the base of the throat.

  At their next lesson she asks about another of his pupils, the former government minister and well-known roué Luis de Ayala. He agrees to introduce them, then has to watch as they become first casual fencing partners, then lovers. One day Don Jaime walks to Don Luis’s house for their weekly lesson, only to discover that his pupil has been murdered the previous night—by a sword thrust at the base of his throat. And Adela de Otero has disappeared.

  It would be unfair to reveal more of the plot, but by the book’s end Don Jaime’s main adversary lies dead at his feet in his fencing room, and as the first rays of the morning sun filter through the cracks in the closed shutters, the old master is standing before the same large looking glass. Absorbed in himself, he is “trying to remember, fixing in his mind—uninterested in anything else that the universe might contain around him—all the phases which, linked with absolute precision, with mathematical certainty, would lead—he was sure of this now—to the most perfect thrust ever conceived by the human mind.”

  This is Pérez-Reverte’s first suspense story, though the third to be published in English. Full of references to his literary heroes, Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Alexandre Dumas, it is a haunting tale; and the film, which follows it closely, won several prizes, with Pérez-Reverte being hailed a
s “a cross between Umberto Eco and Anne Rice,” the successor to Jorge Luis Borges, the successor to Stephen King.

  Although The Fencing Master is part novel of suspense, part classic detective story, Pérez-Reverte is plainly fascinated by the idea of systems. The perfect thrust requires the ideal context in which to deliver it. Is it possible to evolve a system that deals, within its own terms, with all the problems it confronts? Readers of The Fencing Master may regret that the demands of the novel’s powerful ending deny them the chance of learning whether Don Jaime ever writes his masterwork. But Pérez-Reverte had his own botta segreta in store. His next novel, The Club Dumas, portrayed a group of antique-book collectors in present-day Spain, its plot mirroring that of The Three Musketeers. One of the “classic works” the bibliophiles haggle over is the “great nineteenth-century study of swordplay by Astarloa”—so the old man did get to write his “great work” after all, only one has to read a totally separate novel to find this out.

  Of the “perfect thrust” itself, Pérez-Reverte says that he had concealed certain elements so that it could not be followed by would-be assassins; but in truth, whatever the author’s own experiences, the fencing moves in the story, though persuasive enough for fictional purposes, make little sense as actual swordplay.

  As early as 1686 the great Liancour published Le Maistre d’armes, in which he “roundly exposed the vulgar notion (apparently not yet extinct) that there are infallible secret thrusts taught by particular masters.”9 But the perfect thrust does exist. In the words of the twentieth-century master Julio M. Castello, “The straight thrust and disengage with the foil, and the simple cutting attack with the sabre, if done properly within distance, cannot be parried. The reason is one of simple mathematics.”10

  For Pérez-Reverte, however, that was too simple, and he was yet not done with the matter. His third novel, The Flanders Panel, concerns a medieval puzzle painting in which two men are playing chess, while a beautiful woman, wife of one man and mistress of the other, looks on. Its legal owner, le vieux Belmonte, is listening to another character discuss chess, but the parallel with fencing is obvious:

  “The truth is like the perfect move in chess: it exists, but you have to look for it. Given enough time, it’s always demonstrable.”

  Hearing that, Belmonte smiled mischievously. “I would say, rather, that the perfect move you talk about, whether you call it that or whether you call it the truth, may exist. But it can’t always be demonstrated. And that any system that tries to do so is limited and relative … there is no one system, there are no universal axioms. Systems are disparate even within themselves.”11

  This theme is followed through in the author’s next work, The Seville Communion. Pérez-Reverte is almost playful with his fencing interest—the surname of the detective priest is “Quart,” another character is named “Octavio,” a third “Fr. Ferro” (“Iron”). But beyond the demands of the story, the center of interest is elsewhere: can the doctrines of the Catholic Church be regarded as a workable system by which to navigate one’s way on earth?

  Navigation—a matter of life or death for travelers throughout history. Pérez-Reverte’s fifth novel, The Nautical Chart, centers on the world of maps, particularly a sixteenth-century one made by Jesuits about to be exiled from Spain for subversion. For sailors at sea, the need for reliable charts is a matter of life and death, for if their navigation fails they can lay themselves open to attack, die of thirst, or end up on the rocks. In a key passage Pérez-Reverte writes:

  Errors. At sea, as in fencing … everything turned on keeping your adversary at a distance and anticipating his moves. The black cloud forming flat and low in the distance, the slightly dark area of rippled water, the almost imperceptible foam breaking on the surface of the water, augured deadly thrusts that only constant vigil could parry. That made the sea the perfect simile of life.12

  This provokes the question of whether swordplay is not also the perfect simile for life. No Western master in fiction or in fact has attempted an answer; for that we have to go to one of fencing’s earliest critics.

  It was Roger Ascham who, in the reign of Henry VIII, so lamented swordplay’s triumphant supplanting of the longbow in the affections of the English people. A somewhat pedantic, time-serving academic at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he published only two of his writings in his lifetime, a travel book about Germany and Toxophilus, a dialogue about the longbow, which appeared in 1545, the year pistols were first used by English horsemen.

  On the strength of this one book Ascham has been praised as “one of the fathers of English prose,” a writer who “has a claim on all English-reading people.”13 Samuel Johnson wrote a biography of him, and his name is still honored by archers worldwide. His book, however, is not so much a treatise on archery as one on learning any skill or body of knowledge.

  Ascham imagines a conversation between Toxophilus (“lover of the bow”) and his friend the rhetorician Philologus (“lover of reason”), Toxophilus declaring that the end of archery is to hit the mark—excellence is the bowman’s objective. His companion disagrees, saying that there is a perfect end, unattainable perhaps, for which all aspirants must strive. Excellence is not enough—an argument in a direct line from Plato’s Phaedrus.14

  It is likely that archery appealed to a man of Ascham’s interests partly because it provided a practical subject on which greater issues could be aligned: as Toxophilus puts it, “hytting of the marke, the ende both of shootyng and also of thys our communication.” Ascham cites Aristotle’s analogy between shooting and virtue, that both can be directed toward an ideal end. Once the perfect shot is set into motion, hitting the mark offers a sublime beauty. Toxophilus has it that an act may be improved by envisioning its perfect execution. The ideal archer possesses what every man must seek for: self-knowledge; thus Philologus’s thirst for the perfect knowledge of his sport rather than excellence in the skill to perform it. Ascham was not writing about swordplay, but easily might have been.

  * McBane penned a remarkable book of memoirs, The Expert Sword-man’s Companion, or the True Art of Self-Defence. Published in 1728, it remains the only fencing book written by a master who had also been a serving soldier; in all, he took part in sixteen battles and fifty-two sieges. Toward the end of his career he kept an alehouse and fencing school in London and fought thirty-seven prizes in the Bear Garden; but it is extraordinary that he survived that long.

  The son of a Scottish farmer and publican, McBane enlisted in the Scots army in 1687. Five years later he won his first duel, against an army paymaster who had swindled him. Three years after that, he took part in the siege of Namur, where he was shot three times and bayonetted six. In 1697 he went home to Inverness but soon reenlisted, fought a further duel in Perth, leaving his opponent for dead, and fled to Ireland, where he set up a fencing school. Still a common soldier, he found himself consigned to Holland, where he met the man whom he thought he had killed in Perth. They became friends and set up a new academy together. On learning that four fellow practitioners ran a brothel and gaming house, he decided to take a share and fought all four until the last suddenly produced a pistol from his cocked hat and fired. The ball missed, and McBane ran him through the buttocks. The masters then agreed to cut their conqueror in, and from 1700 to 1702 he lived comfortably off the earnings.

  At the battle of “Nemegen” (Nijmegen) McBane’s regiment lost all its baggage, leaving him penniless. He borrowed money but lost it all in a card game, robbed the winner, was set upon by seven men, wounded five, and escaped. After sundry other vicissitudes, including being blown up by a grenade, he set up as a master a third time, simultaneously keeping a brothel with sixteen girls who doubled as his concubines. One day, exhausted after preparations for a forced march, he fell asleep and was left behind by his regiment. “Up comes a French dragoon seeking plunder and took me prisoner, [and] drove me before him until he came to a wood where he wanted to ease nature. When his breeches were down, I mounted his horse and ro
de for it.”

  A year later he was marching with the Duke of Marlborough and in one engagement took three bayonet thrusts as well as receiving “a brace of balls that lies in my thigh to this day.” None of this seemed to quench his spirit, and he was soon setting up tents for sixty “campaign ladies” as well as sixteen “professors of the sword.” This was evidently insufficient, for he led a raiding party on his Dutch allies and carried off fourteen of their women. The next day two dozen Dutch swordsmen came to retrieve them. The two sides drank together, then fought until eleven Dutch and seven of McBane’s band lay dead.

  In 1706 he took part in a campaign that swept the French out of Flanders, in one siege hurling grenades for eight hours while receiving a ball in the head “which will mind me of it while I live.” The following year he fought with a Gascon mercenary who had already killed five men. “I bound his sword and made a half thrust at his breast, he timed me and wounded me in the mouth; we took another turn, I took a little better care and gave him a thrust in the body, which made him very angry; some of the spectators cryed stand your ground, I wished them in my place, then I gave him a thrust in the belly, he then darted his sword at me, I parried it, he went and lay down on his coat and spoke none.”

  His next misadventure followed yet another dispute over money: he was severely beaten, thrown into a well, and left for dead, fortunately in less than a foot of water. In 1708, during one more siege of yet another town, he was knocked to the ground by the head of a comrade torn off by a cannon blast. “All his brains came round my head. I being half senseless put up my hand to my head and finding the brains cryed to my neighbour that all my brains had been knocked out; he said were they your brains out you could not speak.”