The story belongs to the second Gerard series, afterwards published as The Adventures of Gerard. The making of Gerard, now a Colonel, into temporary aide-de-camp to General Suchet suggests that its initial design was set in the Peninsular War where Suchet was the most successful of all Napoleon’s generals, possibly in Tarragona southwest of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, which had been captured by Suchet in June 1811. But the idea of a homicidal underground conspiracy, as opposed to straightforward guerilla brutality, would have had more of an Italian ring, especially when ACD travelled to Naples in April 1902. The decision to place the story in Venice would seem to have stemmed from Venice being History’s greatest casualty at Napoleon’s hands.
In this respect, ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’ by William Wordsworth offered a haunting temptation:
And what if we have seen those glories fade
That title vanish, and that strength decay?
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reached its final day.
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great, hath passed away.
I think Conan Doyle answered as we might expect. ‘How Brigadier Gerard Lost his Ear’ is really a ghost story, where the ancient history of Venice comes to life to give an energy to Venetian hatred of the usurper, despoiler and executioner which the debased inheritors could never supply. The ghosts are certainly substantial, and their physical effects graphic enough; the influence of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ by Conan Doyle’s revered precursor Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) shows itself in atmosphere and resolution; but the heart of the story is something more akin to Hawthorne than Poe, a sense of the hopelessness of fighting History. Conan Doyle was being so antihistorical in order to record History’s revenge. And the consequence is nearer to a story of the supernatural than any other Gerard story. It is also one of the least comic, this Death in Venice.
But in the mass of the stories, this is History forced to laugh at itself. And here, as in so much elsewhere, Conan Doyle shows himself supremely worthy of his Scottish heritage. As Professor David Daiches has reminded us, even in its varying epiphanies of the Gothic, the tragic and, at its close the patriotic, The Antiquary of Sir Walter Scott is essentially comic in its prevailing atmosphere. This is so true of so much of Scott, and Conan Doyle, Scott’s devoted disciple, was the most zealous of all his followers in the fulfilment of that ideal.
Indeed, in his first Waterloo story, The Great Shadow, ACD brings in Walter Scott as a character: not, as often with his other real-life characters, to transmit historical knowledge in an interesting and enlightening form at the expense of the story, but rather as the invocation of a Muse at the story’s beginning. He is in and out by the fifth page, and in four sentences. But he is perpetually in Conan Doyle’s mind, as the great salute to him in Through the Magic Door bears witness. Professor John MacQueen (The Enlightenment and Scottish Literature, Vol. ii. The Rise of The Historical Novel) has picked up point after point to do with Scott’s place in the development of Scottish historical fiction which we ourselves can see reflected in Conan Doyle−the use of character as a dynamic which is substantially non-rational, most fully expressed in action, often containing ‘a quality of the unexpected’; the sense in which a subtext of a remoter historical epoch may charge the drama of a work such as Redgauntlet; and the specific Scottish confrontation and contrast of old and new and the author’s place in their reconciliation. It must be acknowledged that Conan Doyle did not admire Scott’s Napoleon−it was the one production of his master he thought ‘hackwork’:
How could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a portrait of one of Murat’s light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of the Old Guard, drawn with the same strokes as the Rittmeister of Gustavus or the archers of the French King’s Guard in Quentin Durward? ( Through the Magic Door, pp. 31–32.)
We can pay Conan Doyle no finer compliment than to say that he himself more than rose to the challenge, with the stories collected in this book.
Arthur Conan Doyle was far too modest and too much of a gentleman to tolerate any such ascription, even if Scott might well have owned it. Yet their juxtaposition is all the more apposite when we think of the theatrical adaptations of Scott in the Edinburgh of Conan Doyle’s youth, of the success of the stage adaptation of Gerard in London in 1906, and of the coup de théatre which concludes the present volume. Scott celebrated the comedy of courage, the king of fools, the lawyer mocking the law, and the soldier as reliable signal for laughter, when he brought Paulus Pleydell to Guy Mannering and Dugald Dalgetty to A Legend of Montrose. And who, therefore, would be more ready to approve than Scott when after the grandeur of ‘Good-bye’, Arthur Conan Doyle gives us ‘The Marriage of the Brigadier’ as the Gerardien ‘last bow’?
Owen Dudley Edwards
Napoleon ‘was aware, after the fall of Cairo was reported, that the final English triumph was only a matter of time, and consequently ordered [Louis-Guillaume] Otto, the leading French negotiator, to hasten the signing of the preliminaries of peace with [Henry] Addington’s government ([William] Pitt had been induced to resign on 14 March, 1801). News of the surrender of Alexandria reached Paris several days before the tidings reached London, and on 1 October, 1801, the Preliminaries of Amiens were signed. By adroit manoeuvering the French Government had deprived Great Britain of the full advantage of their successful campaign in Egypt; the news reached Whitehall too late to influence the deliberation at the conference table’ (David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York, Macmillan Co., 1966), p. 303). Robert Banks Jenkinson, Addington’s Foreign Secretary, did not become Baron Hawkesbury until 1803; as second Earl of Liverpool he was Prime Minister from 1812 to 1827, the longest continuous term in the last 250 years.
There are many folk who knew Alphonse Lacour in his old age. From about the time of the Revolution of’48 until he died in the second year of the Crimean War he was always to be found in the same corner of the Café de Provence, at the end of the Rue St Honoré, coming down about nine in the evening, and going when he could find no one to talk with. It took some self-restraint to listen to the old diplomatist, for his stories were beyond all belief, and yet he was quick at detecting the shadow of a smile or the slightest little raising of the eyebrows. Then his huge, rounded back would straighten itself, his bulldog chin would project, and his r’s would burr like a kettle-drum. When he got as far as ‘Ah, monsieur r-r-r-rit!’ or ‘Vous ne me cr-r-r-royez pas donc!’ it was quite time to remember that you had a ticket for the opera.