The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. Arthur Conan Doyle
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Marbot Mémoires. Now he based his book on its memory. His manuscript was rescued after the war and returned to him. He called it The Brigadier and this was how the imprisoned consul began his book:
Conan Doyle has written a series of entertaining short stories of which the central figure is a dashing young French hussar, who, in the course of the Napoleonic Wars goes through a number of hair-raising adventures in every part of Europe. The hero is both lovable and laughable. Gallant and gay, valiant and vain, he combines two characters which are sometimes supposed to be incompatible. He is both a braggart and a brave man….
It is evident that by the word ‘brigadier’ the author intended to signify the rank which the French call général de brigade. Unfortunately, there is also in the French service a rank which bears the designation brigadier. It is a very lowly rank indeed: it is approximately equivalent to ‘lance-corporal’. This must have been pointed out to the author while the stories were appearing one by one. When they were collected and republished in book form an explanatory footnote was added. The word ‘brigadier’ is to be understood (it says) in the English sense. This is all very well, but the reader must be permitted to wonder whether the writer, when he conferred that rank upon his hero, was aware that it has a French sense also, and what that sense is.
And Ferrers then introduces his own subject, Marcellin Marbot, ‘a real officer who was undoubtedly the author’s model’. He was not alone in this identification. Andrew Lang, reviewing the Author’s Edition anonymously in the Quarterly Review (vol. 200, July 1904), wrote that
Brigadier Gerard is Sir Arthur’s masterpiece; we never weary of that brave, stupid, vain, chivalrous being, who hovers between General Marbot and Thackeray’s Major Geoghegan, with all the merits of both, and with others of his own.
We may grant ‘Geoghegan’—Conan Doyle was proud that Thackeray had been a friend of his father’s family, deeply respected the campaign in the Lowlands in Henry Esmond and thought Vanity Fair one of the three greatest novels of the nineteenth century, and these no less than Thackeray’s swashbuckling pastiche The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan must be included among the sources of Gerard—with the reservation that Gahagan recounts impossible exploits, while Gerard, no less than Marbot, prefers and reminisces in ambiguous inclination towards an adorned truth.
But there is more to Gerard than an imitation of Marbot, albeit Marbot was the initial inspiration. The Mémoires in the edition Conan Doyle prized was published in 1891, and this French text integrated the fire, and dash, and vivid sense of landscape and action, with subtleties, and of this example Conan Doyle made good use. But he used it in a fashion entirely his own. Marbot tells one story of how the elder of two Cossack prisoners attempted to assassinate him and succeeded in killing a beloved friend, whereupon Marbot shot him, but his furious intention to slaughter the murderer’s brother with his next bullet was stopped by the Cossacks’ tutor who begged him to think of his own mother and spare the innocent. Conan Doyle combined a remarkable mastery of the mingling of pathos and comedy, and one can see him simultaneously moved by the episode and thoughtfully aware of its unintended comic possibilities. So in ‘The Medal of Brigadier Gerard’ this becomes an encounter with a youth who challenges pistol with sword:
‘Rendez-vous!’ he yelled.
‘I must compliment monsieur upon his French’, said I, resting the barrel of my pistol upon my bridle arm, which I have always found best when shooting from the saddle. I aimed at his face, and could see, even in the moonlight, how white he grew when he understood that it was all up with him. But even as my finger pressed the trigger I thought of his mother, and put my ball through his horse’s shoulder.
It neatly makes its point about French chivalry towards a disadvantaged opponent, which deduction ACD had drawn from several sources other than Marbot. But intricate and implicit in the chivalry is the glorious laughter of ‘I thought of his mother and shot the horse’. The chivalry, and the momentary fear transmitted to the reader on the boy’s behalf, are the greater because of the delicious infelicity of the association of images, and Gerard is all the more lovable because he so blatantly and unwittingly makes such a ham-fisted business of recording his unquestionable nobility. Wilde, with whom Conan Doyle had conversed with such interest at the famous meeting which set on foot The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray, had once termed a bad stage version of The Three Musketeers ‘Athos, Pathos and Bathos’. Whether he repeated his remark to ACD or not, his interlocutor showed his capacity for using that formula to excellent (in place of execrable) effect. And if Gerard unconsciously sacrifices tact, thereby he retains his vital narrative pace.
One of the strongest points of difference between Marbot and Gerard lies in their relationship to Napoleon. Marbot, confronted by Napoleon’s Machiavellian encouragement of hostility between Charles IV of Spain and his son Ferdinand, the better to instal Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne, was disgusted
… mais disons-le sincèrement, la conduite de Napoleon dans cette scandaleuse affaire fut indigne d’un grand homme tel que lui. S’offrir comme médiateur entre le père et le fils pour les attirer dans un piège, les dépouiller ensuite l’un et l’autre … ce fut une atrocité, un acte odieux, que l’histoire a flétri et que la Providence ne tarda pas a punir, car ce fut la guerre d’Espagne qui prépara et amena la chute de Napoléon.
The farthest Gerard will go in criticism of his great man is to deplore Napoleon’s insistence that Gerard has the thickest head in his army. Of Marbot’s sense of the great diplomatic games afoot behind the battles and occupations, Gerard (unless directly informed) has hardly the slightest inkling. Beyond his own immediate experience he knows very little, and his Emperor is unquestionable save where he acts unfairly to Gerard. There are moments of similarity in their confrontations: when Napoleon is pleased with Gerard, he pulls Gerard’s ear as in reality he pulled Marbot’s, but then he also pulled Coignet’s.
Conan Doyle has given us the clue: Marbot was an officer, and an officer’s son. De Gonville was an aristocrat: he supplies something of Gerard too, notably in his intoxication with chivalry and its ancient French traditions, but these he says came from his boyhood reading while to Gerard his own place in the tradition is instinctive and unliterary. It is to Coignet, the illiterate soldier, that we must turn for many of Gerard’s qualities and situations. Coignet had been promoted, as Les cahiers du capitaine Coignet proudly asserts, but he started as a private. Gerard we know as an officer, but he shares with Coignet his creation as a soldier by the Napoleonic wars. Of Gerard’s family we know little, save that he loved them, a quality he holds in common with many Napoleonic soldier memorialists—Coignet is an exception here, saying much of his hatred of his stepmother and of the father who sired 45 children (Marbot is far from the least credible of these raconteurs) and abandoned his legitimate offspring to misery and illiteracy and possible death. But Coignet’s harsh background led him into more detail than Marbot on the savagery, and treachery of Spanish guerilla warfare, and Gerard’s adventures in Spain can recall this horrific undertone of Coignet’s Cahiers, however different the actual episodes. It is Coignet who at the end of the war is sent to plant cabbages like Gerard, unlike the officer aristocrats who continue with military careers. It is Coignet who goes to the Café Milon after the war, thus supplying the location where Gerard tells his stories. What Conan Doyle had produced was a hero who moved between the harshly divided classes, and who reflected some of the attitudes of each. His experiences are those of an officer; his circumstances have more in common with the soldiers who originated without family advantages. Ferrers was shrewder than he realised in raising the question of a brigadier’s being a lance-corporal: the aged soldier whose life has been meaningless other than during his Napoleonic experiences has as his counterpart in Conan Doyle’s English fictions the nonagenarian Corporal Brewster in ‘A Straggler of ’15’ still absolutely dominated by his moment of glory at Waterloo. In real life it was this kind of veteran whom ACD would have most naturally encountered as a Portsmouth doctor. And Brewster sees nothing later or greater than his ‘Dook’, Wellington, much as Gerard has no horizons beyond Napoleon. Coignet gives the soldiers’ heartbreak at Napoleon’s abdication, and behind all the laughter and thrilling involvement in