The Duel of the Hat

One Thursday night in France, sometime around 1597, a young man climbed out of his mother’s château window to go fight a duel. He was already an accomplished swordsman, and he was wearing a very fine hat, but he did not survive.

Gabriel-Aldonce de la Garde-Valon had never met Gilles Robert de Lignerac, Sieur de Bazanez. Their quarrel began with a satirical verse, a mutual appetite for violence, and a grey beaver hat sent as a challenge. It ended with two men dead, and another horribly wounded riding away wearing the hat that had started it all.

The story was too good to disappear. It was retold for centuries, and, in the process, transformed. Men who had died survived. Wounds changed. Words were invented. Details migrated from one account to another until separating history from embellishment became a detective story in its own right.

In The Duel of the Hat, swordsman and researcher Guy Windsor follows that trail back to its seventeenth-century source, reconstructing the lives, landscape, weapons and extraordinary sequence of events that led four young men to meet with swords and daggers in the countryside of Quercy.

Part narrative history, part historical investigation, and part reconstruction of a real sword fight, this is the story of a duel fought over honour, reputation, a poem… and a very fine hat.