Joe Manton's Shooting Gallery

A Pair of flintlock duelling pistols by Joseph Manton

Joseph Manton, whose address is given for further particulars of Mrs d'Egville's coach to Paris, was the foremost gunsmith of his day. He experimented with rifling, cartridges and improving the lock mechanism. His duelling pistols had the innovation of added weight at the tip of the barrel that compensated for recoil and allowed deadly accuracy. At the Davies Street address was a shooting gallery where the rich and famous would compete in shooting at a wafer.


(Gronow, 1862)

Although the fashionable congregated at the shooting gallery and the coach was a novel venture, because I have a nasty and suspicious mind, I immediately wondered whether Mrs d'Egville's establishment in Montmartre might be the sort of out-of-the-way place one might send one's pregnant hussies.

Rees Howell Gronow Reminiscences of Captain Gronow, formerly of the Grenadier Guards and M.P. for Stafford, being Anecdotes of the Camp, the Court, and the Clubs, at the close of the last War with France, related by himself (1962)