Satire in The Great French Duel by Mark Twain

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Satire in The Great French Duel by Mark TwainSatire is defined as irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity. Twain spends most of his satirical energy attacking the French culture.He starts with the French Duel. When the word “duel” comes to the mind of an American, we think of bloodshed and the definite casualty of at least one person. Twain tells us that the only danger in fighting a French duel is in the fact that they are held in the open air and “the combatants are nearly sure to catch cold.” He goes on to talk about how M. Paul de Cassagnac, the most famous of French duelists, had been told by his physician that “if he goes on dueling for fifteen or twenty years more – unless he forms the habit of fighting in a comfortable room where the damps and drafts cannot intrude – he will eventually endanger his life.” The idea that someone could duel for twenty years and never be threatened by anything else but a cold is absurd to us, but Twain uses this idea to poke fun at the French.Next Twain speaks of the idea of a “French calm.” In the story, a French calm is describe to be very different from an English calm. We think of calm as being very relaxed and tranquil. Twain describes Gambetta quite the contrary when he says, “He was moving swiftly back and forth among the debris of his furniture, now and then staving chance fragments of it across the room with his foot, grinding a constant grist of curses through his set teeth, and halting every little while to deposit another handful of his hair on the pile which he had been building of it on the table.”Later in the story, Twain is trying to negotiate the weapons and distance between combatants that will be involved in the duel. He makes the sarcastic suggestion or using brickbats at three quarters of a mile.

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