"Dueling persisted in the 18th and 19th centuries, despite denunciations by the church and prohibitions by many governments. Samuel Johnson defended the custom, writing, “A man may shoot the man who invades his character, as he may shoot him who attempts to break into his house.” Dueling sucked in such luminaries as Voltaire, Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel, Tolstoy, Pushkin, and the mathematician Évariste Galois, the last two fatally. The buildup, climax, and denouement of a duel were made to order for fiction writers, and the dramatic possibilities were put to use by Sir Walter Scott, Dumas, père de Maupassant, Conrad, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, and Thomas Mann. The career of dueling showcases a puzzling phenomenon we will often encounter: a category of violence can be embedded in a civilization for centuries and then vanish into thin air. When gentlemen agreed to a duel, they were fighting not for money or land or even women but for honor, the strange commodity that exists because everyone believes that everyone else believes that it exists. Honor is a bubble that can be inflated by some parts of human nature, such as the drive for prestige and the entrenchment of norms, and popped by others, such as a sense of humor. The institution of formal dueling petered out in the English-speaking world by the middle of the 19th century, and in the rest of Europe in the following decades. Historians have noted that the institution was buried not so much by legal bans or moral disapproval as by ridicule. When “solemn gentlemen went to the field of honor only to be laughed at by the younger generation, that was more than any custom, no matter how sanctified by tradition, could endure.” Today the expression “Take ten paces, turn, and fire” is more likely to call to mind Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam than “men of honor.”"