Louis Lucas de Nehon and Joubert’s duel turns a bitter professional rivalry into a fatal public confrontation. After Louis humiliates Joubert at court, they agree to fight with pistols; Joubert dies in the orchard, Louis is wounded, and the commission for the Hall of Mirrors passes to Louis. The apparent victory is shadowed by his belief that Ramsay’s hidden intervention determined the outcome.

Causes and Public Challenge

Louis’s anger has a professional source: he is working at Tourlaville on special mirrors for the Hall of Mirrors project, while Joubert has arrived to make the mirrors for the same commission. When Mansalles identifies Joubert as the man already engaged for the Hall, Louis erupts. He presents himself as an artist and craftsman and dismisses Joubert as an opportunist who lives by a gimmick. The dispute is not merely about status: the two men are competing for a consequential commission, and Louis’s sense that his craft is being displaced gives the rivalry its edge.

The confrontation becomes a spectacle as a crowd gathers. Mansalles tries to calm Louis and then publicly objects to his abuse of Joubert. Louis answers by insulting Joubert’s wife, using a sexualized taunt that prompts gasps and laughter. Joubert appears among the onlookers and slaps Louis, then demands satisfaction for the insults to himself and his wife. Louis is helped to his feet by Ramsay, who warns him that he has gone too far. Joubert offers him the chance to withdraw his words, but Louis does not recant. When Joubert invokes his right to a duel and allows Louis to choose the weapon, Ramsay quietly urges him to choose pistols. Louis accepts and sets the meeting for the day after tomorrow.

The Duel

The duel takes place in a tree-lined orchard, where the rows run east to west. Serge brings a polished mahogany flintlock, and the referee proposes drawing lots to decide who will shoot into the sun. Louis instead volunteers to face east; Joubert does not object. The choice gives Louis the direction he wants, but the scene also places him under the bright sun behind Joubert as the two take their positions back to back.

As the men walk their paces, Louis scans the hillside for Ramsay. He imagines her concealed there, bracing a long barrel and counting the steps with him. At the end of the count, Louis turns and fires. A single shot is heard. Joubert takes another step, drops to his knees, and then falls face down. He has been struck above the right eyebrow. Joubert’s own pistol discharges as he falls, and its shot grazes Louis below the knee.

The immediate result is both decisive and disorienting: Joubert is dead, but Louis has not emerged untouched. He falls, clutching his wounded leg, and looks back toward the anonymous hillside. The account leaves Ramsay’s part in the shooting filtered through Louis’s suspicion rather than an explicit confirmation. He had pictured her aiming from concealment during the duel; afterward, he blames her for Joubert’s death and imagines her satisfaction at having made the shot. His thoughts turn the apparent one-shot victory into a moment of betrayal as well as survival.

Wound, Commission, and Aftermath

Serge and the referee come to Louis’s aid. He is carried through the gardens to the palace, where a royal assistant surgeon treats his leg and wraps the knee from mid-thigh to mid-calf. During the treatment, Louis repeatedly sees Joubert’s face in his mind. The memory makes the death immediate even as the practical consequences of the duel begin to take shape; he falls asleep while the surgeon is still bandaging him.

Later that afternoon, a palace representative visits. He tells Louis that he is giving him the contract, describing him as the only qualified glassmaker left in France and adding that he would have chosen him even without the duel’s outcome. He also presents Louis with a cane because the doctor says Louis will need it, and tells him that the contracts are waiting in his office. The award makes the contest’s professional stakes plain: Joubert’s death leaves Louis as the surviving candidate for the Hall of Mirrors work. Yet the representative’s assurance that Louis would have received the contract anyway complicates any simple reading of the duel as a necessary route to professional success.

The cane becomes the encounter’s lasting object. Louis looks into the blue sapphire eyes set in its dragon head while holding it, linking his wounded body to the commission he has won. The object offers practical support, but it also marks the price and unease attached to that success: Joubert is gone, Louis is injured, and Louis believes Ramsay may have shaped the fatal result from concealment. The contract resolves the rivalry in public terms; it does not resolve Louis’s private distrust.

Narrative Significance

The duel converts Louis and Joubert’s competition over the Hall of Mirrors from professional antagonism into a confrontation governed by public honor. Its escalation is propelled by Louis’s own insults: he turns an already tense exchange into humiliation before a crowd, and Joubert answers with a formal challenge. The outcome then reverses the apparent terms of the contest. Louis survives and receives the contract, but the shooting leaves him wounded and haunted by the possibility that someone he trusted intervened.

Ramsay’s suspected role also complicates the meaning of Louis’s victory. The duel follows visible rules, with a referee, a count, and agreed pistols, yet Louis’s attention keeps returning to the hillside beyond the formal arena. The possible hidden shot makes the public contest feel incomplete: the outcome may have depended on an unseen participant as well as on the two men who faced each other. The scene therefore closes the rivalry through Joubert’s death and Louis’s professional advancement while leaving the moral and personal cost unresolved.