Louis and Joubert compete for the Versailles mirror-gallery commission and duel

Louis Lucas de Nehon and Joubert compete for the commission to supply mirrors for Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, turning a technical contest into a public feud that ends with Joubert dead and Louis awarded the work. Their rivalry links the making of the mirrors to questions of reputation, patronage, and responsibility: Louis secures the commission, but the duel leaves him convinced that the decisive violence came from Ramsay’s intervention.

A commission conditional on skill

Louis first presents Charles Le Brun with glass pieces made using a new process. Le Brun values their quality but asks whether Louis can produce them at a larger scale. Louis admits that he has been making the pieces for only five months and cannot yet meet that requirement. The project is still about six months away, giving him time to improve; Le Brun offers him access to the glassworks at Tourlaville and promises to assess his progress. If Louis can make pieces of sufficient size, the concession will be his. Otherwise, it will go to Joubert, who has already been promised it despite producing inferior pieces.

The terms make the competition both practical and precarious. Louis has an opportunity to demonstrate that his work can meet the project’s needs, but he must do so within a fixed interval and under Le Brun’s judgment. He responds by asking when he can begin. Le Brun arranges access to the equipment and gives him a private workshop and office. Louis’s centuries of experience with glassmaking on Murano give him a substantial advantage at Tourlaville, yet the immediate test remains whether that experience can produce mirrors at the required size. The commission is not simply a prize for past expertise: it depends on making that expertise useful to the palace project.

Rivalry becomes public

At a Versailles gathering, Louis is already conscious of the work still awaiting him and tries to postpone thinking about it until the next day. Joubert arrives with his wife, Emil Restoud. Louis looks across the room to identify the rival he knows of by reputation; Ramsay, standing nearby, asks what Emil is wearing, and Louis describes the striking amount of purple in her dress. This brief exchange establishes the social setting in which the professional contest becomes personal. Louis’s attention is divided between the unfinished work and the people associated with its rival claim.

Later, Louis tells Mansalles that he is working at Tourlaville on mirrors for the Hall of Mirrors. Mansalles reacts with surprise and says that he knows the man making the mirrors for the hall to be Joubert, who has only just arrived. The exchange exposes a gap between Le Brun’s conditional offer to Louis and what others understand about who holds the work. The evidence does not resolve that discrepancy, but it makes the commission’s status uncertain in public, even as Louis believes himself to be working toward it.

Louis responds not by clarifying the arrangement but by openly denouncing Joubert’s character and craft. As people gather, his anger draws further attention. Joubert, present in the crowd, strikes Louis and demands satisfaction, saying that Louis has insulted both him and his wife. He also offers Louis the chance to withdraw the remarks. Louis does not take it. Instead, he continues the attack by making a deliberately humiliating remark about Emil, provoking laughter and distress among the onlookers. Ramsay’s encouragement reinforces Louis’s choice to continue, and Joubert again demands a duel, allowing Louis to select the weapon. Louis chooses pistols and sets the encounter for two days later. Their dispute has now moved from a competition overseen by Le Brun to a public test of honor, with Louis’s own words helping to bring about that change.

The duel and its uncertain agency

Before the duel, Louis thinks of Ramsay as concealed on the hillside, holding a long-barreled weapon and following his progress. During the encounter he fires toward Joubert. Joubert falls, while a shot from Joubert grazes Louis’s leg. Louis is then carried through the gardens to the palace for treatment. The duel’s outcome removes Joubert from the competition, but the circumstances do not leave Louis with a simple sense of victory.

As the surgeon treats him, Louis repeatedly recalls Joubert’s final moments and blames Ramsay for killing him. He imagines that she had been satisfied with the shot and condemns her for taking another life with impunity. This is Louis’s interpretation of what happened, not a clear account of Ramsay’s actions in the excerpt: he had anticipated her presence and aim, but the precise role she played in Joubert’s death is not independently established here. The distinction matters to the rivalry’s conclusion. Louis survives the duel and his rival is dead, yet Louis does not understand the result as his own clean triumph.

The commission and its cost

Charles Le Brun visits Louis afterward and congratulates him, explaining that he is giving him the contract because he is the only qualified glassmaker left in France, while adding that he would have awarded it to Louis in any case. The contract papers are waiting in Le Brun’s office. He also gives Louis a dragon-headed cane, saying that the doctor expects Louis to need it. The commission is therefore secured, but the sequence leaves its success entangled with the duel: Joubert’s removal settles the immediate rivalry, while Le Brun’s explanation presents Louis’s technical qualification—not merely Joubert’s absence—as sufficient reason to award him the work.

Louis accepts the cane and studies the sapphire eyes set into its dragon head. That object makes the result tangible: he has the contract, and he has also left the encounter needing support as he recovers. His response to Joubert’s death, however, prevents the cane and commission from reading as uncomplicated tokens of victory. In the competition’s final reversal, Louis gains the work that had been contested from the beginning, but the means by which the rival disappears remain morally unsettled in his mind. The rivalry thus concludes not with professional recognition alone, but with an unresolved burden of responsibility.