Georgette Heyer, An Infamous Army

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

The youthful gentleman in the scarlet coat with blue facings and gold lace, who was seated in the window of Lady Worth's drawing-room, idly looking down into the street, ceased for a moment to pay any attention to the conversation that was in progress. Among the passers-by, a Bruxelloise in a black mantilla had caught his eye. She was lovely enough to be watched the whole way down the street. Besides, the conversation in the salon was very dull: just the same stuff that was being said all over Brussels. (p. 1)

Summary: All the people in Brussels have one major topic on their minds: Napoleon, who has returned from Elba and is gathering his army, with what seems to be extraordinary success. The city, already filled with English visiting the continent, begins to fill up with English, Prussian, and Dutch soldiers. Everyone is waiting for the arrival of the Duke of Wellington, and Lord and Lady Worth are awaiting the arrival of Colonel Charles Audley, Lord Worth's brother. 

While Napoleon may be the major topic of discussion, there is one other figure who keeps coming up in the talk and gossip: Lady Barbara Childe, the daughter of the Duke of Avon, known to her family and friends as 'Bab'. Strikingly beautiful, daring in fashion, scandalously flirtatious, and apparently completely heartless, Bab seems untameable. When Colonel Audley arrives, however, she finds his cool head and social competence surprisingly intriguing, and when he proposes marriage, she accepts. Nobody thinks that it will work. And, indeed, Barbara seems temperamentally incapable of leaving off her scandalous and flirtatious ways; Charles's relatively unshakeable attitude, if anything, only provokes her. The whole relationship breaks down completely. But then news comes that Napoleon is advancing from Paris. In an instant, all of Brussels is turned upside-down as the men go off to war, and the world looks very different.

There is so much going on in this book, it's difficult to summarize it in a way that does not cut out a great deal. One of the more interesting characters is the Duke of Wellington himself, whom Heyer has famously depicted with extraordinary historical accuracy. The Duke, due to his work in the Peninsular War against Napoleon's invasion of Iberia, is the one on whom everyone's hopes rest, but there is a nagging worry, because he has never gone up directly against Napoleon himself. What is more, the Allied army against Napoleon is a chaotic, thrown-together mish-mash of very different forces with radically different styles of training and fighting. Why, then, is most of the story concerned with young men and women at balls and on holiday excursions? The big problem with fighting Napoleon is the necessity for good timing, which means that you have to have a very large number of young men in the same place, waiting but ready and in good spirits for the time to be unleashed. You need things to keep them out of trouble, especially the officers. The officers are generally from the upper gentry and the nobility, and the governments have a vested interest in keeping their families as supportive of the war as possible. So they must kept busy with the sort of entertainments appropriate to respectable gentry and nobility. But perhaps more fundamentally, every military is just the marching of the society from which it is drawn; a Regency-period military will be a microcosm of a Regency society.

As to the main storyline that binds the whole together, I found Bab very annoying at the beginning, but it eventually becomes clear that she has her almost-redeeming qualities, and that much of our scandalous disregard for propriety is a sort of rebellion against expectations arising from the fact that many others, especially women, will maliciously interpret her actions, anyway. Charles is perhaps the weakest point, in that his primary narrative function is to be imperturbable; but even so, he has enough to do to stay interesting. In both cases, in any case, we have an example of one of the main themes of the novel; in the Duchess of Avon's words, "Nothing in this world is quite perfect, nor quite unbearable"  (p. 468).

Favorite Passage:

'By all means let him be shaved,' said the Duchess, frowning at him. 'He will feel very much more the thing.'

When Barbara came in with her grandfather to be met by the news that Colonel Audley was in the valet's hands, beings shaved, she exclaimed, 'Shaved! Good God, how came you to let him disturb himself for such a foolish thing?'

'My love, when a man begins to think of shaving you may take it from me that he is on the road to recovery,' said the Duchess.... (p. 469)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Georgette Heyer, An Infamous Army: A Novel of Love, War, Wellington, and Waterloo, Sourcebooks Landmark (Naperville, IL: 2007).

Music on My Mind

 

Tim Foust, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".

Things have been slow around here, due to travel, a crowded schedule, and catching up on things, but they should start picking up a bit more next week.

St. Bernard

  Today is the feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Doctor of the Church. From his commentary on the Song of Songs, Sermon XXXIV (pp. 411-412): 

Observe, my brethren, how humility justifies us. Humility, I say, not humiliation. How many there are who suffer humiliation without being humble! Some endure humiliation with bitterness, others with patience, others again with gladness. The first class are culpable, the second are innocent, the last are just. Although innocence may be considered a part of justice, still the perfection of justice belongs to humility. Now, he is truly humble who can say from his heart, "It is good for me that Thou hast humbled me." But he who submits to humiliation against his will cannot sincerely say this.... For it is not to the humbled but to the humble that God gives His grace. The humble man is he who converts humiliation into humility, and it is only such as can say to God, "It is good that Thou hast humbled me."

A Philosophic Profligate

 The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honour about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as for anything else. He will not see that any worthy idea, like any honest woman, can only be won on its own terms, and with its logical chain of loyalty. One idea attracts him; another idea really inspires him; a third idea flatters him; a fourth idea pays him. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other. The Sentimentalist is a philosophic profligate, who tries to capture every mental beauty without reference to its rival beauties; who will not even be off with the old love before he is on with the new. Thus if a man were to say, “I love this woman, but I may some day find my affinity in some other woman,” he would be a Sentimentalist. He would be saying, “I will eat my wedding-cake and keep it.” Or if a man should say, “I am a Republican, believing in the equality of citizens; but when the Government has given me my peerage I can do infinite good as a kind landlord and a wise legislator”; then that man would be a Sentimentalist. He would be trying to keep at the same time the classic austerity of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an aristocrat. Or if a man should say, “I am in favour of religious equality; but I must preserve the Protestant Succession,” he would be a Sentimentalist of a grosser and more improbable kind. 

 This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy every idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.

[G. K. Chesterton, "The Sentimentalist", in Alarms and Discursions.]

I think it's fair to say that we live in an era where Sentimentalists in this sense sometimes reach locust-levels of infestation.

People, Poets, and Professors

 Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research. 

[G. K. Chesterton, "The Three Kinds of Men", in Alarms and Discursions.]

Above and Below

 What disturbs the peace of unity is ambition, the vice that steals away from itself the soul which abandons itself to it, tearing it, as it were, in pieces, and dispersing it. The resplendent light of truth, who will not lose it in the mud, in the darkness of lust? Avarice and cupidity steal from us goodness, for it is the peculiar property of goodness to communicate to others the goods which it possesses. Thus, when Plato asked himself why God had created the world, he answered: "because he was good." These are the three vices: pride of life, concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, which, as St. John says, are of the world and not of the Father who is unity, goodness, and truth indeed.

Let us therefore fly from the world, which is confirmed in evil; let us soar to the Father in whom are the peace that unifies, the true light, and the greatest happiness. But what will give us wings to soar? The love of the things that are above. What will take them from us? The lust for the things below, to follow which is to lose unity, truth, and goodness.

[Pico della Mirandola, On Being and One, Chapter X ]

From Him, and through Him, and for Him

 All things that are beneath God have an efficient, an exemplary, and a final cause. For from Him, and through Him, and for Him, are all things. If then we consider things as constituted by the efficient causality of God, we call them beings (entia), since it is because of this efficiency that they participate in being (esse). If we consider them as conforming to and according with the Divine exemplars which we call Ideas, and according to which God has created them, namely, being, unity, truth, goodness, something, thing -- the two last due to the disciples of Avicenna --, we call them true. The true picture of Hercules is, for example, said to be that which conforms to the true Hercules himself. If, again, we consider things as tending to God as their last end, we call them good. And finally, if each thing is considered absolutely, according to itself, we call it one. Now, the order is such that each thing must first be conceived under the idea of being, since every thing, whatever it be, must be produced by an efficient agent before being anything particular in itself, lest that which it is do not depend in its totality from the efficient cause. Thus it happens that a thing which comes after God cannot be conceived without being immediately thought of as a dependent being: finite being is being by participation. To being succeeds unity. Third comes truth, since it is only when a thing exists as such that one can inquire if it corresponds to the exemplar according to which it has been formed. If it resembles that exemplar, it has only to turn towards it by its attribute of goodness, in virtue of a sort of affinity or relationship.

[Pico della Mirandola, On Being and One, Chapter VIII.]