At a distance from her, in the same cemetery and unbeknownst to everybody lies buried the man who loved her and immortalized her.

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. Unfortunately, I’m not longer quite sure exactly where I got the detail about the Bordeaux club from. It was almost certainly in either Martin Monestier’s or Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s book on duels (both in French), which is where I’d go for further details; unfortunately, one of them has been discarded from the library where I found it and the other is in a library that’s not currently letting people in, so I’m not able at the moment to track the information down. The Internet has also failed me — none of the obvious suspects has any information on the matter.

Sorry about that.

A little further research on the matter, thanks to the marvels of the Internet, sheds some speculative light on the question. The anecdote seems to have made its first appearance in Émile Colombey’s Histoire anecdotique du duel dans tous les temps et dans tous les pays of 1861 (https://books.google.ca/books?id=LxNBAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false), on page 153. It contains little more information than is presented here, other than that Professor Colon was supported by a volume of Tribonian, though whether that means that his favouring the colon was due to something Tribonian said, or that an actual volume actually helped him during the duel, is alas undecipherable (though the former does seem more likely).

What is specified is that the duel took place in January and that both duellists were professors at the Law School. This suggests that one of the two was very likely Hyacinthe Blondeau. Blondeau (1784-1854) was an eminent professor at that faculty, as well as one of the beneficiaries of the 1830 revolution: the ordonnance of the first of August that year name him as the faculty’s Dean, a position he held until 1843 despite the fact he was a Belgian and didn’t acquire French citizenship until 1838. He was an expert in Roman law, and the year following the duel he published an edition of Justinian’s Institutes, completed by a choice of other legal texts, with a French translation by Louis-Bernard Bonjean on facing pages. Whether Blondeau would have already been involved in this project in January 1837 I don’t know, but though it can’t be proved, it is very tempting to imagine the duel coming about because of a translation; those do seem like the sort of circumstances in which a colon vs. semi-colon discussion would develop.

That being the case, the immediate novelistic instinct is to identify his opponent as Bonjean. Bonjean, who was born in 1804, had been one of the fighters during the 1830 revolution, and lost an eye in the process. He would eventually become a distinguished jurist and senator under the Second Empire, as a result of which he was executed during the 1871 Commune, in the company of the Archbishop of Paris. He was a prolific author, and the translation of Justinian was a major building block in his reputation. The problem with identifying him as a participant in the duel is that while he originally hoped to become a law professor, he gave up on that ambition after failing to be named as one of the Chairs at the law school of which Blondeau was dean. His giving up on a teaching career is dated to 1838, the year his translation of the Institutes was published, when he purchased a position as advocate with one of France’s supreme courts. What I can’t find out is whether he actually did teach at the Faculté de droit in the years prior to his failing to become one of its Chairs. If he did, it would make him an acceptable candidate for being one of the duellists, as that would justify the anecdote calling him a professor.

Even if Blondeau and Bonjean were indeed the duellists — which I emphasise is entirely speculative — it is unfortunately impossible to tell which one favoured the colon and which the semicolon. Except, perhaps, for one tiny thread of circumstantial evidence even more gossamer than the others on which I’ve built this mountain of conjecture: if Bonjean was the victorious Professor Semicolon, then one can only wonder how Dean Colon reacted when, a year later, Bonjean postulated for a Chair in the department. What effect might that have had on his failure to achieve it?

But then again, the reverse is just as likely: a Dean Semicolon might not have wanted to let someone foolish enough to favour the colon become quite so eminent a member of his faculty.

Nor does any of this invalidate the possibility that either Bonjean or Blondeau was indeed a participant, but against someone else entirely, and that the quarrel was the whole reason they decided a new edition and translation of Justinian was necessary.

All of which I freely admit is a rather long answer to the question of what their names might have been.