demanding satisfaction

if you live your life according to the code duello the way that i do, you will know that in duels, the challenged party has the right to choose the dueling weapons. these could be anything from knives to ninja stars to (apocryphally) tainted sausages.

of course there has never been a dual more preposterous or unusual than the one that took place between french hot air balloonists armed with blunderbusses (a type of proto-shotgun) over the city of paris in 1808:

…Early in the nineteenth century, a Monsieur de Grandpé and a Monsieur de Pique…had quarreled over Mademoiselle Tirevit, a famous dancer who was the mistress of the former but had been discovered in compromising circumstances with the latter. They decided to fight it out in balloons and on May 3, 1808.

Watched by a huge crowd which had been drawn by the sight of the balloons but little imagined the purpose they were meant to serve, each combatant climbed into his car, armed with a blunderbuss, since pistols would obviously have been ineffective in the circumstances. At nine o’clock the cords were cut and the balloons rose majestically into the air keeping within about eighty yards of each other. When they had risen some 2,000 feet, Monsieur de Pique fired his blunderbuss without result. His fire was returned almost immediately by Monsieur de Grandpré, whose shot punctured his adversary’s balloon, so that it hurtled to the ground dashing Monsieur de Pique and his second [a trusted representative] to pieces on a rooftop. The triumphant Grandpré then drifted happily away from the scene of his victory to land safely at a distance of seventeen miles from Paris.

from robert baldick’s the duel (1965).