The Duel at London’s Regent’s Park Hotel

The Duel at London’s Regent’s Park Hotel is a wartime episode in which Romain Gary is drawn from an embarrassing quarrel at the Wellington Nightclub into a pistol duel with Polish officers. The confrontation begins as a defense of the French Air Force’s prestige, but its elaborate formalities and sudden reversals make the narrator’s sense of duty difficult to separate from theatrical absurdity. A potentially grave encounter becomes, in his telling, both a test of military honor and an occasion for comic self-exposure.

From public insult to challenge

At the Wellington Nightclub, Gary has been trying to escape a companion whose sustained discussion of literature leaves him bored. His efforts to disengage fail, and the arrival of three Polish officers does not provide the relief he expects: they successively take his companion onto the dance floor, pointedly treating him with contempt. The room is full of Allied officers, and their amusement makes the exchange public. Gary understands the scene as more than a personal inconvenience. In his account, the French uniform’s prestige is at stake, so he responds physically to the first two officers and then to a third who denounces the French Air Force and France. His earlier wish to be rid of his companion thus collides with the public role he feels obliged to perform.

The episode’s central irony is already in place before anyone proposes a duel. Gary says he had been trying to get away from the young woman, yet finds himself fighting over her because the officers’ behavior has turned a private social irritation into a test of national standing. The narrative does not present his actions as the outcome of a simple personal rivalry. Duty, wounded pride and the watching crowd all press upon him, while his account repeatedly emphasizes how absurd it is to defend the possession of someone he had hoped to leave behind.

The duel takes shape

After the nightclub confrontation, the Polish officers demand a duel. Gary initially rejects the idea, reasoning that without spectators there is no need to continue the display. The officers answer by insulting Frenchmen as cowards, and the dispute proceeds to the Regent’s Park Hotel. They settle on pistols in a bedroom, at first proposing five paces. Gary travels with them and his companion, who insists on accompanying the party; because she is going upstairs too, they take a suite with a sitting room. The formal challenge, intended to restore honor, therefore continues amid practical arrangements and the companion’s fascination with the prospect of a dramatic experience.

The encounter is shifted from a bedroom to an empty, carpeted corridor on the upper floors. During the air raid, the elevators are not operating, and the party climbs the stairs while bombs sound outside. Gary asks to increase the distance to ten paces. He says he wants to avoid even a minor injury himself and does not want to kill or seriously wound his opponent; he also worries about the trouble a death or grave wound would cause. His request that he not have to fight the other officers in turn further shows how he tries to place limits on an event governed by the opponents’ code of honor. The ritual is not, for him, an uncomplicated embrace of danger: he participates while looking for ways to contain its consequences.

Honor, identity and the shot

Gary’s choice of a second gives the confrontation another point of tension. The Polish officers are anti-Semites and regard his selection as a deliberate insult to Polish honor. His second, meanwhile, climbs the stairs in visible fear, praying as the bombs continue. Gary’s mother does not oppose the duel. He interprets her silence as approval, connecting it to the patriotic action she has long wanted from him and to his childhood training in arms by Lieutenant Sverdlovski from the age of eight. The scene consequently links this wartime act to both maternal expectation and an earlier preparation for armed conflict, though the narrator presents that connection with comic exaggeration rather than solemn ceremony.

When the duel begins, the explosions make the corridor a poor setting for careful aim. Gary wounds his opponent in the shoulder. The wounded officer is carried into the suite, where the companion takes on the role of nurse. Gary then greets the opposing party with formal gestures and addresses them in Polish, using his knowledge of the language to surprise men who had treated him as a foreign adversary. He describes their astonishment at hearing insults from their French opponent as a personal triumph. The moment turns the duel’s national and ethnic assumptions inside out: Gary’s Polish language and background complicate the boundary the officers are trying to enforce, while his allegiance to France remains central to his stated sense of duty.

The aftermath and the episode’s reversals

After the shots, Gary’s second offers him four five-pound notes, explaining that the Polish officers are anti-Semites and that he too is Polish. Gary refuses the money. He objects to the second’s racist attitude and invokes his several inheritances and his identification as a free citizen of the world, while also affirming Poland’s longstanding alliance with France. The refusal is another reversal: the second interprets the conflict through shared Polish identity and anti-Semitism, but Gary rejects payment and refuses to let that reasoning define either his conduct or his loyalties.

The next morning, a police car collects Gary at Odiham. After questioning at Scotland Yard, he is handed over to French authorities at Admiral Muselier’s headquarters, where Lieutenant Commander d’Angassac and Commander Auboyneau question him. The account explains why the consequences are limited: the wounded officer had been expected to leave the hotel supported by friends and pretending to be drunk, but the companion called an ambulance, making the incident harder to conceal. Gary also believes that the shortage of trained air crews in the Free French Forces helped protect him, since he was considered valuable and his squadron was about to depart for distant skies. He suspects, without claiming certainty, that his mother intervened behind the scenes. He receives a reprimand and leaves for Africa a few days later.

The episode closes not with a triumphant settlement of honor but with Gary’s return to military service after a brief official reckoning. Its shifting motives and outcomes—an effort to escape a tedious evening, a public defense of France, a carefully limited duel, a refusal of money and a reprimand rather than a harsher penalty—make the incident an account of duty entangled with performance. The narrator’s humor does not erase the risk; it shows how he makes an absurd and dangerous predicament legible by dwelling on its contradictions.