The 16 May 1894 edition of Le Figaro published a description of ‘a lively event’ to be held at the Theâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels: a presentation of ‘Fencing through the Ages’, with a series of scenes and dialogue depicting sword fights from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The scenes were to have a musical score, and dialogue was provided by actors from the theatre's company, but the swordplay itself was to be enacted by ‘M. et Mme Gabriel’ of Paris, as well as ‘several English fencers, the best blades in the United Kingdom, belonging to the London Rifle Brigade’, and including amongst their number ‘Captain Alfred Hutton, a scholar at the same time as a practitioner, who has made a specialty of historical fencing’. The event was arranged by the press but under the auspices of the president of the Cercle d’Escrime de Bruxelles (the Fencing Circle of Brussels) Monsieur Albert Fierlants. It had been inspired by a similar event in Paris a few months earlier. Organised by the Parisian ‘Society for the Encouragement of Fencing’ (la Société d’Encouragement à l’Escrime) this display had featured many of the same scenarios that were to be enacted in Brussels, including Monsieur and Madame Gabriel's smallsword fight. These scenes were created by Monsieur Adolphe Corthey, whose research was lauded in La Grande Dame: ‘The careful and difficult reconstruction, a result of research which has certainly been laborious, does M. Corthey the greatest honour’.

These two events and the men most directly connected with them – Alfred Hutton, Adolphe Corthey, and Albert Fierlants – along with the fencer and antiquarian Egerton Castle (whose 1885 work Schools and Masters of Fencing: From the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century Fierlants translated into French) were the leading lights in the nineteenth-century movement to rediscover and recreate the swordplay of the past. Their search for an authentic medieval swordplay makes them worthy of the title of the progenitors of a modern fascination with historical swordsmanship. This has developed in several different directions since then, with a focus on entertainment, competition, and most recently, academic study.