#armand dhubert

[madmerchant]

My Feraud and d’Hubert, with a rundown of essentials for those new to Point of Honor —

Gabriel Feraud.

• Genuinely loves his job and feels invincible on horseback. • Gregarious and charming; loved by subordinates but sucks at pleasing superiors. • Will (try to) defend a lady while semiconscious and bleeding. • Facing bullshit from everyone (narrator included) for being a Gascon peasant. • No living family. Father was an illiterate blacksmith. • Canny and manipulative; adrenaline high makes him dumb as a cannonball. • Intensely distrustful of every human being except Napoleon.

Armand d’Hubert.

• Notable family, wants to do them proud: stressed about his career. Has royalist in-laws. • Quick and cool head for tactics under pressure. Drop him a hint, and it will splat on his boots. • Extremely close to his younger (& far smarter) sister Léonie; otherwise a loner. • Alarmingly valiant when healthy; adorably wimpy when hurt. • Cherishes idealistic illusions about any French government. • Has said illusions painfully destroyed while trying to get Feraud off the Bourbon hit list. • Will weaponize his compact mirror and strategically faint into people’s arms.

[madmerchant]

I have an additional 19th-c-France fandom and in case it is as new to you as it was to me, let me introduce Point of Honor. It is about the ongoing dispute of cavalry officers Feraud and d’Hubert. They are my new lens for Napoleon nerding. They cope with societal fuckery, political fuckery, geo-political fuckery, and cataclysmic regime change, and take it all out on each other with slashy fencing. Everything they are wearing here is illegal, like much of their conduct. Enjoy.

• There is a movie (The Duellists, Ridley Scott) … • based on a short novel (The Duel or The Point of Honor, Joseph Conrad) … • based on real guys (Dupont & Fournier).

My universe is the book* plus influence from history. My favorite point of departure from canon is: Adèle is not cool with being betrothed to a stranger twenty-something years too old for her — until (this bit is canon) the said stranger returns at the crack of dawn, with dirt on his back, from a witness-free woodland ~duel~ that he refuses to talk about. Her fiancé is probably too dumb to realize what is going on between himself and his adversary, but that can be rectified.

* The 1908 McClure copy (linked above), to be nit-picky. The republication in the collection A Set of Six edits a line so that instead of my favorite virgin-d’Hubert it has merely romantically-uninvested-d’Hubert. Just let me have this okay. (Plus this is the copy with glamorous illustrations by Sayre Groesbeck.) (The uniforms are not historically accurate but their vibe is.)