serious and even earnest attempt at a bit of historical fiction. I had
heard in my boyhood a good deal of the great Napoleonic legend. I had a
genuine feeling that I would find myself at home in it, and The Duel
is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers, of that
presumption. Personally I have no qualms of conscience about this piece
of work. The story might have been better told of course. All one's work
might have been better done; but this is the sort of reflection a
worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his
conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.
How many of those visions have I seen vanish in my time! This one,
however, has remained, a testimony, if you like, to my courage or a
proof of my rashness. What I care to remember best is the testimony of
some French readers who volunteered the opinion that in those hundred
pages or so I had managed to render "wonderfully" the spirit of the
whole epoch. Exaggeration of kindness no doubt; but even so I hug it
still to my breast, because in truth that is exactly what I was trying
to capture in my small net: the Spirit of the Epoch--never purely
militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike in its
exaltation of sentiment--naively heroic in its faith.


1920. J. C.





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