Of the _duel d'honneur_ there is less to be said, though Dumas more than once sought to reconcile estranged and impetuous spirits who would have run each other through, either by leaden bullet or the sword. A notable instance of this was in the memorable _affaire_ between Louis Blanc of _L'Homme-Libre_ and Dujarrier-Beauvallon of _La Presse_. The latter told Dumas that he had no alternative but to fight, though he went like a lamb to the slaughter, and had no knowledge of the _code_ nor any skill with weapons. Dumas _père_ was implored by the younger Dumas--both of whom took Dujarrier's interests much to heart--to go and see Grisier and claim his intervention. "I cannot do it," said the elder; "the first and foremost thing to do is to safeguard his reputation, which is the more precious because it is his first duel." The Grisier referred to was the great master of fence of the time who was immortalized by Dumas in his "Maître d'Armes." Dumas himself is acknowledged, however, on one occasion, at least, to have acted as second--co-jointly with General Fleury--in an _affaire_ which, happily, never came off. It was this Blanc-Dujarrier duel which brought into further prominent notice that most remarkable and quasi-wonderful woman, Lola Montez; that daughter of a Spaniard and a Creole, a native of Limerick, pupil of a boarding-school at Bath, and one-time resident of Seville; to which may be added, on the account of Lord Malmesbury, "The woman who in Munich set fire to the magazine of revolution which was ready to burst forth all over Europe." She herself said that she had also lived in Calcutta as the wife of an officer in the employ of the East India Company; had at one time been reduced to singing in the streets at Brussels; had danced at the Italian Opera in London,--"not much, but as well as half the ugly wooden women who were there,"--and had failed as a dancer in Warsaw. "This illiterate schemer," says Vandam, "who probably knew nothing of geography or history, had pretty well the Almanach de Gotha by heart." "Why did I not come earlier to Paris?" she once said. "What was the good? There was a king there bourgeois to his finger-nails, tight-fisted besides, and notoriously the most moral and the best father in all the world."