Hundreds of thousands lost their lives to these contests that were often triggered by the pettiest of status slights. A typical duellist would ‘prefer to die by a bullet or stab wound than allow unfavourable ideas about him to remain lodged in the mind’, writes Alain de Botton, who records a man in Paris being killed after describing his rival’s apartment as ‘tasteless’, a man in Florence dying after accusing his cousin of ‘not understanding Dante’ and a duel over possession of an Angora cat.
