Pertinax's First Duel

"You'll want the good wine tonight," the tavern keeper said, not unkindly, "if you're celebrating your first month among the Forty-Five."

"I'll want the cheapest thing you pour that won't embarrass me in front of the others."

The keeper gave him a look Pertinax had grown used to receiving from tradesmen across his first weeks in Paris: the particular look of a man doing arithmetic about a customer's actual means behind a proud family name. Pertinax's name was considerably grander than his purse, a fact the king's stipend had done less to correct than he'd hoped once he'd actually priced out the boots, the lodging, and the countless small expenses that court life apparently required of a man expected to look the part.

"You're drinking water tonight, Pertinax?" someone called across the tavern, loud enough for half the room to hear it.

"I'm drinking exactly what I please."

"You're drinking what your purse allows, more like. Montcrabeau." The man said the name with a particular emphasis that turned a proud old family into something closer to a joke. "Grand name, empty pockets. Someone should tell your ancestors the estate didn't survive them as well as the name did."

The room laughed. Pertinax felt the laugh land exactly where it was aimed.

"You're going to challenge him over that," his friend Chalabre said afterward, not quite a question.

"I am."

"Over a joke about your purse. He's twice your fortune and probably better with a blade."

"I know both of those things." Pertinax checked his own sword, more from habit than necessity. "I also know that if I let that particular joke stand tonight, there'll be a worse one next week, and a worse one after that, until every man in this company thinks my name is simply something to laugh at. A rich man can laugh off an insult. I can't. That's not fair, and I've made my peace with it not being fair — but it's still true, and I intend to act like it's true."

He won the duel the following morning, barely, and mostly on the strength of having nothing left to lose beyond the exact dignity currently being disputed, which turned out to concentrate a man's attention considerably more than his wealthier opponent's more comfortable circumstances ever required of him.

"That's the last joke about your purse you'll hear in this company," Chalabre observed, watching the news of the duel's outcome spread through the barracks by that evening.

"I should hope so. I can't afford to fight one of these every week."

"You won't need to. One's usually enough, done properly." Chalabre clapped him on the shoulder. "Though I'll say this — it's a hard sort of arithmetic, that a poor man has to risk his neck over what a rich man simply laughs away."

"It is. I didn't choose the arithmetic. I've only learned to do the sum correctly, since no one's offered me a fairer one to work with instead."