By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Mainly, however, he wrote—by most estimates some three hundred volumes of plays, memoirs, travel, and fiction. In his early thirties he turned to historical romances; profiting from the vogue for serialization in popular newspapers, he set his stories anywhere from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The facts were always secondary to a good story: “True, I have raped history,” he boasted, “but it has produced some beautiful offspring.” It was Dumas, sometimes said to be the most widely read author of his age, who did more to popularize swordfighting than anyone in history—because so many people read him and because he created the archetypes who would reign again in cinema. He was himself taught fencing three times a week by the renowned foilist, Adolphe Grisier, the model for his 1859 novel The Fencing Master. He also wrote the preface to Grisier’s treatise Les Armes et le Duel—and may have contributed more than that, as there are touches in the main text that are pure Dumas.a “I possessed all the physical advantages which a rustic life gives,” he once explained. “I could ride any horse … and was pretty smart with the foil.” Dumas describes a duel he fought and won, to his great surprise, almost by mistake—his opening thrust caught his opponent off guard. “I attacked him en quarte, and without making a pass with my sword in order to feel my way with my man, I thrust out freely en tierce. He leapt backwards, stumbled over a vine-root and fell head over heels.” Dumas’s sword had pierced his shoulder—and “the sensation it had given my opponent was so startling that, lightly though he was wounded, the shock had overturned him.… It turned out that the poor lad had never handled a sword before!”15

  One of Dumas’s biographers insists categorically that all the duels he claimed to have fought were fakes and cites one where the only “real” fighting broke out by accident. To impress the unwitting seconds, Dumas drove himself into a frenzy, swishing his sword dramatically with shouts of “Come, defend yourself! Ha! A victory over you would be but a paltry thing!” This was too much; his opponent seized his sword and landed a hit on the arm. Dumas looked at the blood staining his sleeve, and cried out, “What’s that for?” The “duel” had run its course.16

  It is a pity that Dumas rarely took time in his books to re-create the swordfights with the authority he must have gained; maybe only d’Artagnan and his companions taking on the Cardinal’s men at the start of The Three Musketeers and d’Artagnan’s later duel with Jussac are truly convincing. He wrote the original novel in installments between March and July 1844, the same year that he penned The Count of Monte Cristo, collaborating with one Auguste Maquet on both books, as well as on the first sequel to The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and the next work in the sequence, The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Dumas described all these books as “easy literature,” and certainly action dictates everything. If there is an important theme in his writings, it is the wronged outsider who comes to the fore—the embodiment of the Romantic myth.

  Other French popular writers put swordplay front and center, not merely as a chance for action. Edmond Rostand’s famous play about Cyrano de Bergerac premiered in Paris in December 1897, making Cyrano one of the classic figures of popular sentiment. Théophile Gautier published Mlle de Maupin, his romance of the real-life singer, actress, and swordswoman, in 1835, and a swashbuckling romp, Le Capitaine Fracassé, in 1863. Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, or, The History of a Scoundrel, the tale of a young provincial seeking to make good in Paris, is in many ways autobiographical. Its hero displays a compulsive interest in dueling, and the account of an evening en gala is the funniest sketch of a fencing exhibition we have. The passage is too long to quote in full, but what follows gives its flavor. The evening opens with a bout between a couple of professionals,

  two good masters, if not of the first rank. They appeared, both spare, with a soldierly bearing and somewhat stiff in their movements. After making the appropriate salute like two robots, they began to fight, looking in their canvas and white leather uniforms like two soldier clowns fighting for a joke.

  Every so often, you heard, “Touché!” And the six judges nodded their heads in a knowing way. All that the public could see were two live puppets who were jumping about sticking out their arms; they did not understand at all what was happening; but they were pleased.17

  No matter that fencing on the Continent was of a higher standard than anything Britain could produce. A number of British authors—Alfred Hutton, Frederick Pollock, Cyril Matthey, and Carl Thimm among them—played a dominant role in charting both the history and technical advances of swordplay. Perhaps this was because they saw it not as a timeless mystique but rather as an evolving discipline. Coming up behind them was Egerton Castle and, dominating all, Richard Francis Burton. Yet even though nineteenth-century literature was exploding with scenes of derring-do, people wanted their swordplay in fantasy and romance, not in reality, and by the end of the century fencing was in danger of going the way of real tennis or Eton fives.

  The fact that it did not can be credited, indirectly, to our final author. He was six feet four, weighed 235 pounds, and he was keen on golf, ballooning, bicycling, billiards, bowls, boxing, cricket (especially), fishing, football, foxhunting, motoring, tricycling, even baseball. The one sport he had no interest in would seem to be fencing, but his friends did, in particular a group involved with the magazine The Idler: Anthony Hope, of The Prisoner of Zenda; James M. Barrieb; E. W. Hornung, creator of Raffles, the amateur cracksman; and Jerome K. Jerome, the magazine’s editor. The author who never picked up a sword was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And Sherlock Holmes did fence.

  The first Sherlock Holmes story is “A Study in Scarlet,” which appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. (Conan Doyle received £25 for this “shilling shocker”—not bad, given that his earnings as a doctor were £300 a year.) Watson draws up a list of Holmes’s “limits” (or characteristics of his new friend). Number 11 reads: “Is an expert single-stick player, boxer and swordsman.” Several cases on, Holmes himself tells us that, during his two years at “Camford” (Doyle’s amalgam of Oxford and Cambridge), “bar fencing and boxing I had few athletic tastes.” In “The Five Orange Pips,” the Great Detective’s skills are listed as “violin-player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.” Yet there is not a single story where Holmes matches blades with an enemy.18 The only partial exception occurs in “The Illustrious Client,” in which Holmes uses his skill with the singlestick to beat off ruffians in Regent Street.c

  But Holmes was not the end of the story. Not for nothing did Conan Doyle’s gravestone carry the inscription (from Robert Louis Stevenson) “Steel true / blade straight.” In 1891 he published the first of his historical novels, The White Company, about “men who loved honor more than life,” set during the Hundred Years’ War. He also began planning a series of stories based on a real-life soldier, the Baron de Marbot, one of Napoleon’s lieutenant generals. Marbot’s own picaresque memoirs, published in Paris some fifty years earlier, had just been translated into English, and Conan Doyle was captivated by the recollections of this vain, yet innocent and chivalrous man, with “a head as thick as his heart is strong.” The outcome was a character named Brigadier Etienne Gérard, the best horseman in the French army, an inveterate ladies’ man, an innocent braggart, and an expert swordsman.

  The Brigadier made his appearance in 1896—the year of the first modern Olympics. In the very first story, the Brigadier is given a message to carry to Napoleon. His superiors, believing him to be so obtuse that he will inevitably fall into enemy hands, deliberately write the message to lead the British astray; but Gérard wins through—to the fury of the emperor and his marshals. Having set off on horseback, he encounters an enemy force, fires his pistol, cuts his way through enemy lines, fords a river, and runs cross-country to his destination. Sixteen years later, these five disciplines were to be incorporated into a new sporting event—the Modern Pentathlon, at the 1912 Olympics.

  WHAT WOULD BECOME KNOWN AS THE OLYMPIC GAMES EMERGED in 776 B.C. as part of
a festival held at the summer solstice on the plain of Olympia, in the district of Elis. Aethlios, first King of Elis, is said, erroneously, to have given his name to the word “athlete,” though the word translates as “one who competes for a prize.” There were several other “games,” varying in size and importance, a number of them taking place in or around Athens, the first of which dates from 1370 B.C. At Olympia, entries were confined to Greek male citizens, who had to agree to train under strict supervision for ten months. There was only one event, a sprint the length of the arena. The distance (170 m) was said to have been measured out by Hercules himself: it was as far as he could walk while holding his breath.

  The prize for the victor was a crown of wild olives, part of the cow that had been sacrificed at the festival, and the right to leave a miniature likeness of himself in the temple. Competitors initially wore clothes; then, after 720 B.C., they ran naked. Explanations for this change vary: for some, it was to demonstrate the beauty, strength, and grace of the human figure; for others, the change occured after one of the contestants, Koroubios, threw aside his loincloth so as to run faster—one of the first instances of streamlining gear in order to win.

  There is a third reason: married women were not allowed to watch the race, a rule dating back to the time when fertility rites played a major part in the celebrations. Women caught spectating were dealt with in a clear and direct way: they were thrown down a steep mountainside. One woman, Callipatira of Rhodes, who had coached her son Pisidorus after his father’s death, crept in disguised as a man. When her son won, she jumped over the barrier dividing spectators and judges and her clothing came loose, giving her away. Since she came from a great family of athletes (her brothers had all been champions, and her father was one of Greece’s most famous boxers), she was forgiven. However, to avoid any recurrence, it was decreed that all contestants and coaches should henceforth appear naked.

  Later, in the years of Spartan ascendancy, women were not only allowed to attend but encouraged to compete. The Spartans added wrestling (often highly bloody encounters); a three-part event made up of running, jumping, and spear-throwing; and the discus—but still no swordfighting. With the Roman conquest came boxing—more vicious than wrestling, as competitors wrapped their fists in leather thongs, sometimes embedded with nails. Mutilation was a mark of honor.

  For about twelve hundred years the Games continued to be held at the base of Mount Olympus. Rows over professional status, doping, bribery, politics, and boycotts were commonplace. The first publicly disgraced cheat was Eupholus of Thessaly, who bribed three boxers to lose intentionally (it is not clear quite why) in 388 B.C. He was fined, and the money used to erect a statue of Zeus outside the stadium, to appease the god and warn others who might be similarly tempted. Before long there was a line of these statues, called “zanes,” each bearing on its base a description of the offense and a note of praise to the actual victor.

  A truce on all political disputes was declared for the duration of the Games. Even during the protracted Peloponnesian War hostilities were suspended and the belligerents competed in the festival. Eventually, in A.D. 393, the Christian emperor Theodosius banned the games as pagan—despite which they continued for another thirty years, until the site was destroyed. In the sixth century an earthquake buried the ancient Olympic arena completely, “cheat” statues and all.

  Yet the idea of an athletic festival persisted. The Greeks revived gatherings for which they used the word “Olympic” in 1859, 1870, 1875, and 1889, but these festivals, like most others, were strictly local. The Much Wenlock Games in Shropshire date back as far as 1636 and were held regularly thereafter; among the later events were such abstruse contests as tilting at a ring and tent pegging, as well as cricket and lawn tennis. In the summer of 1866, London held an Olympics that drew ten thousand spectators, with twenty-four events, including fencing with bayonets and a saber competition won by one G. Henderson of Liverpool. The great English cricketer W. G. Grace, then eighteen, entered a twenty-flight hurdle race and won by twenty yards. Other games had been held in France, Sweden, and Germany, and as early as 1788 the president of Harvard was petitioned to restart the Olympics in America. The first true prototype, however, emerged in Sweden, host to a festival “in commemoration of the Ancient Olympic Games” in 1834 and again in 1836.

  Enter Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, scion of a family whose title went back to 1477. After brief military training and a few months at law school, the young baron felt a vocation as a social reformer. As a boy he had experienced the “humiliating defeat” of the French in 1870, which he attributed (questionably) to the physical inferiority of his country’s youth. French schools concentrated on high academic standards and generally ignored physical education. Coubertin decided that English education, with its emphasis on sport, was far superior. When he came across Tom Brown’s School Days, Tom Hughes’s novel of life at Rugby School sixty years before, he felt he had discovered a paradigm of how education should work, with Dr. Thomas Arnold, Rugby’s headmaster, “his lifelong hero, prophet, and father-substitute.”20 As much tract as novel, the book is hardly enough to shape a philosophy, but Coubertin thought “l’éducation anglaise” offered the right pathway to French manhood. A visit to Rugby consolidated his view, and as he plodded toward his vision of a new Olympic Games he carried a copy, in English, of what became his bible of the strenuous life.

  Financially Coubertin had no need to work, so he could afford to dabble in quasi-political good causes. He became one of the 2,731 members of the Unions de la Paix Sociale, a member of the Société d’Economie Sociale and of numerous educational committees, in which capacity he helped bring sports to French schools and initiated interschool competition. In 1889 he organized an international conference on physical education and went to the Paris Exposition, joined to which was a medieval-style sporting meet that he dubbed “great competitive pageants for school youth.”21 During his speech at the conference, almost as an afterthought and inspired in passing by a campaign in the newspaper Le Temps, he brought up the idea of a modern Olympics, which he repeated during a lecture tour of the United States and again on a visit to London. Three years after the initial conference, in November 1892, at a meeting at the Sorbonne, he appealed for a “splendid and beneficent” sports festival.

  Events moved quickly after that. In the fall of 1893 Coubertin made a second tour of America. The timing was right: numerous rowing clubs had sprung up throughout the United States from the 1830s on, and by 1869 the first international contest had taken place. Yacht racing also dates from the 1830s, with the America’s Cup first contested in 1857. Track and field athletics took shape in the 1870s; both football and rugby were well established, while baseball was being referred to as “the national sport” as early as 1856. Parallel with these upper-class sports, a host of other recreations had grown up in the 1870s and 1880s, ice skating, bicycling, and long-distance walking among them. These were but the prime channels of an extraordinary outpouring of participatory and spectator sport in the United States in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Coubertin was impressed and heartened, convinced that his ideas were timely.

  In June 1894 the London Spectator dismissed his brainchild as “a harmless whim,” but by the fall, at yet another conference in Paris, the little Frenchman was pressing for the capital to host the first revived Olympic Games, alongside a “Universal Exposition,” by the turn of the century. By conference’s end (the British delegates having failed to have “amateur” formally defined by social class) the thirteen nations present voted overwhelmingly to undertake the Games. Twenty-one other nations sent written support.

  It is unclear what process led to the choice of participants and events for the first modern Olympics (for romantic reasons, the committee decided to hold them in Athens; the original starting date of 1900 was brought forward to 1896 at the suggestion of the Greek delegate), but Coubertin himself ensured that both foil and saber were among the original events. Altho
ugh he was little over five feet tall, the baron had been a fencer, and his memoirs display a photograph of him fencing outdoors, his slightly squat figure making an appropriate beau escrimeur. In 1906 he even drew up the rules for saber on horseback.22 Richard Mandell evokes the Coubertin of those years:

  His mustache was splendid. It was carefully pruned, with sumptuous tendrils that swooped out to wisps at the end, beyond the width of his canted ears and broad, asymmetrical forehead. He looked like a whiskered cat destined for a long life.… His heavy eyebrows and piercing eyes were always dark. In fact, his eyes were so dark as to appear to be without pupils. They were a bit popped, with Italian verve.… Dazzling and aggressive, they were the eyes of a man continually gauging the possibilities for action … this man with a peppy organgrinder’s good looks.23

  The revived Olympics were a great success: 245 athletes from twelve nations competed in forty-three different disciplines. But they almost did not take place: no invitations were sent out till December 1895, just eight months before the event, and more than 60 percent of the eventual entries came from Greece, with Germany, France, and the United States sending 21, 19, and 14 contestants respectively. Britain sent 8, and both the British and French teams were unofficial. Such was the informality of the Games that a British lawn tennis player entered the Olympic tournament simply to secure a court to play on. Nevertheless, on March 25, 1896, a dreary, rainy Wednesday, cannon were fired, doves were released, and after 1,471 years the Olympics were reborn.d

  Throughout the history of the modern Games only fourteen events have been held at every Olympics: the 100-, 400-, 800-, and 1,500-meter races, the marathon, the 110-meter hurdles, the high jump, pole vault, long jump, triple jump, shot put, and discus, the 1,500-meter freestyle swimming—and the individual saber. Individual foil was excluded only in 1908, when the London organizers decided it was unsuitable for competition. In 1896 the fencing was mainly memorable, in so amateur an enterprise, for the inclusion of a foil event for professional masters; but then Coubertin was ever the pragmatist, and in 1931 admitted: