nd though you had, alone, three
enemies upon you at once, your two companions being killed, you have no
more wrong done you, than I should do in a battle, by running a man
through whom I should see engaged with one of our own men, with the like
advantage. The nature of society will have it so that where there is
troop against troop, as where our Duke of Orleans challenged Henry, king
of England, a hundred against a hundred; three hundred against as many,
as the Argians against the Lacedaemonians; three to three, as the Horatii
against the Curiatii, the multitude on either side is considered but as
one single man: the hazard, wherever there is company, being confused and
mixed.

I have a domestic interest in this discourse; for my brother, the Sieur
de Mattecoulom, was at Rome asked by a gentleman with whom he had no
great acquaintance, and who was a defendant challenged by another, to be
his second; in this duel he found himself matched with a gentleman much
better known to him. (I would fain have an explanation of these rules of
honour, which so often shock and confound those of reason.) After having
despatched his man, seeing the two principals still on foot and sound, he
ran in to disengage his friend. What could he do less? should he have
stood still, and if chance would have ordered it so, have seen him he was
come thither to defend killed before his face? what he had hitherto done
helped not the business; the quarrel was yet undecided. The courtesy
that you can, and certainly ought to shew to your enemy, when you have
reduced him to an ill condition and have a great advantage over him, I do
not see how you can do it, where the interest of another is concerned,
where you are only called in as an assistant, and the quarrel is none of
yours: he could neither be just nor courteous, at the hazard of him he
was there to serve. And he was therefore enlarged from the prisons of
Italy at the speedy and solemn request of our king. Indiscreet nation!
we are not content to make our vices and follies known to the world by
report only, but we must go into foreign countries, there to show them
what fools we are. Put three Frenchmen into the deserts of Libya, they
will not live a month together without fighting; so that you would say
this peregrination were a thing purposely designed to give foreigners the
pleasure of our tragedies, and, for the most part, to such as rejoice and
laugh at our miseries. We go into Italy to