Further to some parliamentary exchanges including a number of tender allusions to the mother, two persons from our political double-decker world have been in a position to repair to the special purpose ground for interacting by means of two bullets really devoid of any great consequences.But the arranged event was not consummated. The witnesses of the two interacting parties (that is, the honorable official witnesses, not the eye-witnesses, countermanded the ceremony and closed the incident for good, by employing minutes and other such Mediareview contraptions. Which leaves us with nothing else to do, therefore, but express our regret for having panicked in vain – and the occasion of noting down a few belated reflections in respect to the duel today… But first, we cannot see why our MPs should have recourse at all to such an extreme proceeding, when it is a universally known fact that scuffling has never been prohibited in Parliament. The gentlemen who make the laws have always been entitled to infringe them before everyone else. Nobody has ever even dreamed of contesting this paternal right of preemption they enjoy. And since all the public rights and prohibitions emanate from the Parliament…it is, we may say, only natural for there not to remain absolutely any such rights and prohibitions stagnating in there… To us, private people, however, it is forbidden to fight in public, even just tentatively, on special occasions, for fear of immediately having the police forces on top of us. But I'm asking you: has anyone heard of any two MPs who have had a scuffle inside the Chamber being subsequently brought to the police headquarters or before the justice of peace? Dueling is a barbarian institution; hence it has been sanctimoniously preserved to the present day.But in order for it to remain accessible for the middle-class heroism, dueling has had to adapt to the civilized mores of today. The real battle is waged on paper, in the press rather than on the field. It is not so much a matter of the two adversaries fighting each other as of their respective "witnesses" contending by means of the orthography and grammar of our language, in letters and minutes they exchange…Formerly, dueling was an aristocratic privilege. It was only if you enjoyed high status by birth that you were entitled to feel offended and shoot your gun or flourish you sword.Nowadays, however, any honorable citizen is entitled to get offended. Herein lies progress: dueling has fallen out of grace.The characteristic of democratic dueling is to be found in its lack of consequences – which is warranted by the law. And the more civilized mankind will become, the more devoid of consequences will dueling be, while also all the more capable to guarantee the security and well-being of the citizens. If we want to begin to see what a big distance separates the dueling of tomorrow from the dueling of yore, nothing more is needed than to take a close look at the way dueling is put in application by certain cultivated persons, who, owing to their social status, are expected to anticipate upon moral progress – and to compare their ways to those of the ordinary people, compelled, under the circumstances, to represent, in the current epoch, an older age in the history of our human civilization. Recently, in a high-life restaurant, I have had a vision of tomorrow's dueling, while observing a nervous incident which took place between two members of our good society. The two adversaries, who were there with their wives, sitting at two neighboring tables, stood up suddenly – I ignore the exact cause of the irritable event – they exchanged a pair of oaths of no consequence each, one in French, one in Romanian. Then they sat down and ate. That's all…
by George Topîrceanu (1886-1937)
