The Gerard stories will perpetuate that legend, as told by Gerard, and as written by Conan Doyle. Holmes would have been nothing without Watson; Napoleon will live because of Gerard.

And Napoleon would have been nothing without Gerard. ‘Of bravery I say nothing’ remarks Gerard in ‘Millefleurs’:

Those who have seen me in the field are best fitted to speak of that. I have often heard the soldiers discussing round the camp-fires as to who was the bravest man in the Grand Army. Some said Murat and some said Lasalle, and some Ney; but for my own part, when they asked me, I merely shrugged my shoulders and smiled. It would have seemed mere conceit if I had answered that there was no man braver than Brigadier Gerard. 

This is in part simply another brilliantly-polished facet of Gerard’s eternal self-congratulation; but it has its own self-deconstruction, in which ACD amused himself by occasionally indulging. There is no man braver than Gerard, because Gerard is all of them: ACD certainly gave him touches of his fellow-Gascon Joachim Murat (1767–1815), of the idolised Antoine Lasalle (1775–1809), of the martyred Michel Ney (1769–1815), just as he combined within him various touches and perceptions of the memorialists Jean Baptiste de Marbot (1782–1854) and Jean-Roch Coignet (1776–1860?).

Thus it is that Gerard has to embody the Égalité which alone survived the French Revolution after Napoleon’s domestic rule emasculated Liberté and his conquests put paid to Fraternité, and he must reflect old aristocracy, new bourgeoisie and newest of all, the promoted peasants. The gallant, cheery Marbot might seem an obvious companion to the seventeenth-century Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas pére (1802–70), but Coignet, an illiterate risen from the ranks to Captain and self-educated raconteur, could look any hard-boiled modern proletarian autobiographer in the eye. Gerard would not think of himself as proletarian, of course, as his own account of his family background indicates:

… my family, though of good repute, has never been wealthy, and I could not bring myself to take anything from the small income of my mother. On the other hand, it would never do for a man like me to be outshone by the bourgeois society of an English country town, or to be without the means of showing courtesies and attentions to those ladies whom I should attract. It was for these reasons that I preferred to be buried in the dreadful prison of Dartmoor. (‘How the King held the Brigadier’)

This is revealingly autobiographical. Conan Doyle himself came from so complex a mixture of Irish ancestors, Catholic and Protestant, rich and poor, grandiloquent in claim and uncertain in fact, that he knows how to supply a hero who can straddle all classes and beat the lot of them in Gasconnades.

‘We say “Proud as a Scotsman”’ remarks the Duke of Buckingham in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers to which the Gascon d’Artagnan replies ‘And we say “Proud as a Gascon”: the Gascons are the Scots of France’. Etienne Gerard is of course a Gascon, and the Scots background to Conan Doyle’s British novel on Waterloo, The Great Shadow, gives us a hold on the identification. Formally it is to identify Gerard with his Dumas counterpart, much as contemporaries and modern biographers identified Jean Lannes (1769–1809) (‘How the Brigadier joined the Hussars of Conflans’) with his native Gascony and its most famous literary offspring. Actually, this use of Gascon identity makes helpful points about the wider rôle of poor peripheral provinces, with their resourcefulness, inferiority complexes, alleged boastfulness, and advantageous self-dependence. But the Gascon models and the Dumas exemplars include more than d’Artagnan. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson showed one means of using such influence in Allan Breck Stewart, whose drunken gambling away of his and David Balfour’s assets comes directly from Athos’s similar performance in The Three Musketeers. Gerard himself initially seems more like Porthos than the others, but he acquires something of them all, as in different ways does Allan Breck. Conan Doyle would have been the more conscious of the derivation, anxious as he was to appear French, where Stevenson needed simply to show a Francofying influence on the Jacobite Highlander Allan. But Stevenson no less than Conan Doyle had an Irish godfather alongside their Dumas, for it was the Irish novelist Charles Lever (1806–1872), who inspired Stevenson’s Chevalier Burke (The Master of Ballantrae), and who gave Conan Doyle a perspective on the Napoleonic wars with his novels Charles O’Malley (1841) and Tom Burke of Ours (1844). (As a prisoner O’Malley actually sees Waterloo from the French side and Burke is a supporter of Napoleon.)

So there is a strong Irishness in our first vision of Gerard: the ‘Medal’ can be effectively read in a Munster Irish accent, like those of Conan Doyle’s maternal relatives, or with a Scots accent, like that of its author who read it so successfully to audiences in his North American tour of Autumn 1894 just before its publication. ‘I am not a man who is easily daunted, either … Ah, we were great, both Violette and I … Oh, the shouting and rushing and stamping from behind us! … my faith, I soon saw that there was no time for loitering, so away we went …’ It would be good to hear Sean Connery read the stories with true Irish-Scots resonance. The point is that Conan Doyle evidently came on Gerard’s narrative voice from within, and evolved it into its distinctive essence.

III

But the Gerard voice seems to have taken form more easily than did Gerard himself. When we look at ‘A Foreign Office Romance’ it becomes evident that its narrator may have been their creator’s first idea for a series character taking the places of Holmes and Watson whereas the Gerard ‘Medal’ was simply devised as a singleton. The vision of the old raconteur in the cafe´ began with ‘A Foreign Office Romance’, but Conan Doyle soon found that a cunning spy embroidering his memories could not carry the tragedy, as well as the comedy, which he demanded for his Napoleonic series. Sherlock Holmes had been formally killed a year before Gerard’s first appearance, each being enshrined in the December Strand−1893 and 1894 respectively. Holmes had been born in A Study in Scarlet (written 1886, published 1887) with no noticeable intention of a series. Gerard came on the scene when Conan Doyle had already established as a genre the short story series of self-standing episodes with two constant protagonists. The decision to build another series around Gerard and Napoleon seems to have arisen from the success of the ‘Medal’ with Conan Doyle’s American audiences.