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igenlodeI was surprised to hear that D.K. Broster's novels had been originally regarded as rip-offs of Baroness Orczy (with the exception of the historical French setting, they really have very little in common), but in "Sir Isumbras at the Ford" we actually do get a Scarlet-Pimpernel-style rescue mission taking place, even if the victim is a small boy who has been kidnapped into post-Revolutionary France rather than an innocent in danger of the guillotine!
It has been a long time since I read this book, mainly because the account of the Quiberon disaster (something that, one feels, would never have featured in Orczy's optimistic adventures) haunted me for years as a child. On this occasion I consciously picked it up again as a result of having read The Marquis of Carabas, which features an equally (probably more so, because Sabatini goes into the damning disagreement and back-biting among the commanders, while Broster gives us only the exhaustion and dwindling hope of those under their command) devastating version of Quiberon. That experience reminded me of the existence of "Sir Isumbras".
I always liked Fortuné de la Vireville (ironically named, as he himself points out), and rather resented it when Broster brought him back as a flamboyant minor character speaking quaint English for the purposes of her lesser novel "Ships in the Bay", which I read chiefly as a curiosity after having visited Fishguard. (I suspect she liked him too and wanted to show him happily married and getting up to adventurous things, but it doesn't feel at all like the same person, I'm afraid.) In "Sir Isumbras" he features as a sardonic and quick-witted adventurer with an unspoken tragedy in his past, and a soft spot for his friend René de Flavigny's small son, for whom in the course of the book he comes to feel an almost parental responsibility, a responsibility which ultimately gives him the will to survive at all costs...
On this reread for the first time I noticed the reason for that apparently random title, in the form of a quoted verse preceding the contents page:
Broster is fond of epigrams, most of which entirely escaped me during my initial reading of her work due to my inability to read them at that time. The quotations used in this book are not in French but from old ballads, but it sounds as if this episode of Sir Isumbras and the little boy is not actually part of the mediæval "Metrical Romance" to which it is credited, but was a Victorian pastiche created to accompany the Millais painting entitled "Sir Isumbras at the Ford". Evidently this picture was famous enough in its day for Broster to be able to refer to it with at least some expectation that the reader would recognise the allusion, but in the days before the Internet I had no notion whatsoever of its existence :-p
(And second-hand copies of the book are nowadays available astonishingly cheaply, when you consider the time and trouble that it took to obtain even one by contacting all the rare books dealers across the country in the days before the Internet: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/sir-isumbras-ford/author/broster/ )
Judging by the publication date and list of other works by the same author in my (1918) copy, this must have been Broster's first 'solo' work, after the two somewhat uneven books co-written with Gertrude Taylor (of which I prefer the earlier "Chantemerle" to "The Vision Splendid"; it is perhaps as well they broke up the writing partnership when they did, since the latter novel really is a bit disjointed in its subject matter). But much of "Sir Isumbras" is as good as anything she ever wrote.
The book has a slightly slow beginning, set, like that of the later "Marquis of Carabas" (and probably for the same reason), among the impoverished and disunited emigré society in exile in London, in which all the plotting serves no real purpose other than to get the Marquis de Flavigny out of the way on a fairly pointless errand to 'the Regent' in Verona. It dawned on me for the first time thanks to this re-reading that the mysterious Regent exists because the action takes place between the execution of the King and the death of the Dauphin -- which actually occurs in the background during the course of the novel -- and there is thus a nominal Regency in effect involving one of the adult members of the royal family, a detail of which I had had no idea... [Edit: in fact this is explicitly laid out in the first pages, in the midst of de Flavigny's story: now that King and Queen alike were done to death, their children captives and a Republic in being.... though the rightful little King might be close prisoner in the Temple, his uncles — the Comte de Provence (Regent in name of France) and the Comte d'Artois— were still at large. Which is an object lesson to writers, alas, as to how the readers may skip carefully laid-out background material in search of more character involvement.]
I note that 'the young Frenchman' René de Flavigny, is, in fact, as mentioned briefly at the start of the book, thirty-two! I suppose he feels very innocent and inexperienced to both Fortuné — only a few years older — and to his father-in-law, Mr Elphinstone.
The latter muses that "his son-in-law's tact and ability made him a very useful person to his own party and a person proportionately obnoxious to the other", but we don't really get any opportunity to see that in the course of this story. Contrary to our initial expectations, it is La Vireville — who appears at first only to be a minor character in the lives of René de Flavigny and the little boy Anne-Hilarion — who is to be the main protagonist, and the Marquis's supposed political significance is important only in providing a rationale for Anne to be kidnapped off to France by Republican agents in his absence, making it necessary for the Chevalier de la Vireville to set off in pursuit and thus setting in motion the adventures of the first third of the plot.
This section is the one closest in spirit to an Orczy adventure, as we have first of all the wonderful creation of the two saintly but sinister old ladies (one of the parts of the plot that I remembered most clearly from my original reading) who attempt to extract Royalist secrets from the little boy, who has no idea that they are not what they seem, and who in his innocence knows rather too much about his father's activities and about the double identity of La Vireville, also known as the guerilla Chouan leader "Monsieur Augustin". When the latter, all too well aware (as the hapless Mr Elphinstone was not) of the undercover activities of the de Chaulnes sisters, arrives post-haste to salvage Anne from their grasp, the little boy has already been carried off to France, not in the hopes as such of extracting very much further useful information from him under questioning, but as bait -- in the hopes that his father the Marquis de Flavigny can be induced to trade his own life in exchange for the liberty of his adored son, or at the very least can be lured into setting his head in the trap in some kind of rash rescue attempt.
This would, of course, be a stupidly quixotic thing to do. But in the Marquis's absence, La Vireville, no mere political plotter but a competent and invaluable guerilla fighter, finds himself on the spot as the next candidate in line for the role. "It was sheer insanity. He had no right to do it, for he knew his life to be a hundred times more valuable than a child's happiness. He could be very ill-spared in Northern Brittany, in Jersey..." All the same, he takes the devil's bargain that the old ladies offer, with every intention (as they no doubt suspect) of breaking his part of the exchange if he can. At the very least they can oblige him to sacrifice his valued incognito in the process, after Anne has already inadvertently betrayed it...
And then instead of the Sydney Carton situation we have been half-led to expect, there follows an extended serio-comic Scarlet-Pimpernel-type rescue and escape in disguise, as La Vireville very conveniently catches up with Anne's abductor despite the long start (the author eventually suggests a little weakly that Mme de Chaulnes' agent must have had 'secret business' of his own in Calais that caused him to delay their departure in a manner "providential from Fortuné's point of view") and attempts to return with the boy to English soil while carrying out the entirely unaccustomed duties of nursemaid to a six-year-old. Anne is an inconvenient but endearing companion whose presence is both a shield --for no-one expects a fugitive Chouan leader to be travelling with a small child-- and a complete giveaway for anyone in pursuit of the ill-assorted couple. And although the little boy is very attached to his escort and does his best to obey all the instructions he is given, it is hard for the Chevalier to anticipate in advance or for Anne to remember all the things he must *not* say... right down to the simple word 'Monsieur' instead of 'Citoyen'.
(In this early book, Broster adopts the old-fashioned expedient of using 'thou' to represent a switch into 'tu' by the French-speakers, something that she wisely eschews later on, but in fact in this context, where on its rare occurrences it pretty much universally refers to Anne-Hilarion ("Thy uncle wishes thee to drink the soup!" "The little one, thou seest, when he was with us at Kerdronan..."), it does just about work.)
In the second third of the book -- although in the author's own scheme of division it straddles Book Two ("The Road to England") and Book Three ("The Road that Few Returned On") -- the little boy is largely absent, and so is the touch of humour that has leavened the sometimes harrowing drama. La Vireville returns to active duty in France, first for his encounter with a murdered leader's 'agent de la correspondance', a term never actually translated but clearly representing some kind of contact/liaison officer, and secondly as part of the disastrously ill-organised Quiberon expedition, which ends, "as he had always known and expected... with his back to the wall and a firing party in front of him" in the mass prisoner executions that follow their surrender.
The agent de la correspondance at Porhoët is Raymonde de Guéfontaine, who like Avoye de Villecresne in "The Wounded Name" is no youthful ingénue but the widow of an arranged marriage. From the author's point of view, this presumably liberates her from the social constraints that might otherwise have been a problem, while in romantic terms it frees her from blushing inexperience without any overtones of trailing tragedy... or at least that is my guess as to the purpose of this plot device, since she will turn out to be the designated love interest :-( And that, unfortunately, is pretty much what it did feel like.
The existence of Raymonde, along with Quiberon, Anne and the old ladies, was one of the few points I remembered clearly about this novel when I had forgotten all the action and the entirety of Fortuné's backstory, but in her case what I solely remembered about her was disliking the love story. And as an adult, with more tolerance for the existence of romance, I'm afraid I found that it *still* didn't work for me -- I can see how the pairing is supposed to work out in theory, but it just didn't click.
On the face of it they ought to be a good match; Raymonde is as resourceful and adventurous as he is, and engaged in the same sort of undercover work at equal risk, as Avoye --for all her 'past exploit' that gives credibility to the idea that she might be in danger-- is not, and indeed the final 'bonding moment' between them in this book takes place thanks to the cooperation of shared survival. But I was an ardent partisan of Avoye, a far more conventional heroine, and of her affair with Aymar which, however peripheral to the action,is so central to the outcome of his story. I didn't dislike Raymonde de Guéfontaine as such, but I was simply not convinced by the way that she seemed to get shoe-horned in as a supposedly significant element in the protagonist's life at a very late stage, when to all appearances he has scarcely spared her a moment's thought, and has spent the interim in supposedly violent regret for another woman.
For it is as a part of the events at Quiberon that Fortuné de la Vireville's backstory is unfolded to the reader, though he has already previously been established, for all his courage and wry humour, as a man with bitter scars and a lost love in his past. And the revelations at that point failed to work for me either, with what felt like an almost physical jolt of disappointment. It ought to have been a laying-bare of a deeply private part of his soul, but instead it fell rather flat, and just didn't *fit*.
The moment, earlier on in the book, when, after saying goodbye to Anne-Hilarion, whom he has clearly come to love dearly, he lets slip the confession that "hers would have been like Anne" (and his mother responds only, without need for explanation, that a child of his own would have had darker hair), is heartbreaking in its loss and longing. I simply couldn't square that with the subsequent explanation that the woman he loves is not dead, nor even lost beyond recall, but merely, like that Lady Sophia who set Damerel on his course of dissipation in Georgette Heyer's "Venetia", a slut whose "noble degree hid the soul of a courtesan". And that just didn't match, for me, with the glimpses we'd had of his feeling for her (the remembrance of "a tie untimely snapped"), or with the image of a woman he *could* or would care hopelessly for.
The material with St.Four is oddly unsatisfactory, as well: La Vireville finds himself brought abruptly face to face with his former friend, then forced by the vicissitudes of war to work with him. The woman concerned has now betrayed them both, and St.Four clearly wants a reconciliation, but manages only to sacrifice his life offscreen in a rather perfunctory flashback; the whole thing ought to be a major turning point in the protagonist's journey, but with everything else going on it gets rushed over without leaving much impact. (And the whole business of the duel, as elaborated upon later, seems pointlessly over-complicated; in "The Yellow Poppy" there are good reasons, both practical and dramatic, for a pistol combat by lots, but here the only rationale appears to be so that Fortuné can have the advantage yet spare his opponent's life, which he could surely have done in any fight... while it's quite hard to acquire a superficial duelling scar by being shot in the face!)
His initial meeting with Madame de Guéfontaine is gripping stuff, culminating with her failed attempt to stab him in his sleep to avenge her dead brother. It's an episode for which he ultimately rather admires her rather than the reverse, and which will become a point of teasing between them in the end; what feels far more forced is the way that he then follows this up by launching a rescue attempt (which will cost him dearly) with very little coherent rationale, after she has attempted to betray him to the enemy. It doesn't come across as quixotic, but simply as completely unwarranted -- so far as we know she *hasn't* "bewitched" him, as his sullen follower Grain d'Orge complains, and he has no motive and certainly no right to cover up for her and then risk his own mission.
Once the mutual misunderstanding is explained, they get on very well (although not to the point where he shows any romantic interest in her). But unfortunately the plot requires the action to take place before any possibility of explanation, and to me it's a stretch.
After their parting, meanwhile, comes the whole business of Quiberon, and the encounter with St.Four that rakes up all the old memories that are shown to be very much alive; and to the Marquis de Flagny's family and friends back in England there come the first intimations of disaster, while La Vireville and the other survivors face the firing squad, and the tender mercies of Madame de Chaulnes once more. (This latter confrontation, again, never quite made sense to me; in terms of structure we instinctively expect that "devil's bargain" that the Chevalier made at the start --and then seemingly side-stepped so easily-- to come back with eventual consequences, but Madame de Chaulnes' motive for aborting the execution in order to question him appears weirdly trivial, and her eventual "pretty taste in vengeance" rather anti-climactic. It's another place where I can see the mechanics of the plot being worked out, but the result doesn't arise instinctively in the way that, say, La Vireville's promise to his dying friend does that he will do his best to save himself in order to raise Anne as his own son...)
I still don't understand the author's choice of structure, in which Book Three carries on almost to the end, to be followed by a very truncated Book 4; for me this middle third of the book finished naturally at the chapter-end that represents that execution --the final aftermath of Quiberon-- when we cut away from the protagonist's view at the last moment, and an instant later those who heard it "crossed themselves at the sound of that volley". (And while Broster has form in disposing of her protagonists, especially in the early books --Gilbert in "Chantemerle" and Horatia's Armand in "The Vision Splendid" both die before the final resolution of the plot-- it's a very unexpected outcome to kill off the main viewpoint character in a book that has been so centred around him as this one. While "The Yellow Poppy" is shared between the stories of Gaston and Valentine and "The Flight of the Heron" alternates evenly between Windham and Ewen Cameron, "Sir Isumbras" has definitely been the story of Fortuné de la Vireville and not, for instance, of Anne-Hilarion de Flavigny, however much the little boy features in the plot, still less that of Raymonde de Guéfontaine, who has appeared so far only in a single disconnected episode of the Chevalier's adventures, a hundred pages previously!)
But Raymonde features largely in the next two chapters; the adventures are ended, and the subject matter of the final third of the book is their psychological aftermath. She and Anne-Hilarion meet at last in their common grief, and the author does manage to convince me that Raymonde, during their brief acquaintance or thereafter, has fallen in love with La Vireville, lean and quick and half-mocking, who "would do the most unexpected things with an air of being amused by them", and realises it only when it is too late. The scene where she dreams of his ghost again at Porhoët in company with her brother, both bearing their fatal wounds --Mes morts, the outcry for her beloved dead-- holds an aching power.
And it is only after *that* that Broster reveals that --though hitherto we have had not the slightest suspicion of it-- although so many have died at Quiberon, La Vireville, by a series of miracles[†] and his own determination, is not in fact one of them.
† to which the author appends a footnote that a similar escape was a matter of historical fact.
Instead he has spent the last few months severely ill and with convenient amnesia (the confusion not assisted by the fact that his instinctive response, in his half-delirious state, was to give his Breton nom de guerre rather than his family name) due to the injuries --and subsequent amputation-- he incurred whilst escaping. His slow recovery is buoyed up by the thought that Anne-Hilarion will need him now that René de Flavigny is dead, which sows an appalling twist of guilt into the discovery that the Marquis has also survived.
Only in addition to this fresh offshoot of the relationship between him and the boy that has been gradually established throughout the whole novel, we suddenly get the statement that he is obsessed by love for Raymonde de Guéfontaine, a process which is now said to have begun after his escape at Quiberon, when "she, with her high courage and her ideals of devotion, would never counsel him to lie here like a coward until he was found and shot". Unfortunately when this happens 355 pages into a 386-page novel, it comes as an extreme afterthought, especially from someone who has been steadfastly faithful against all reason to someone else as a major theme of the rest of the book.
I'm afraid that for me what rings markedly more true is the scene where it is the unexpected arrival after all of Anne (despite the fact that it is supposedly the news he brings about Raymonde) which liberates La Vireville from his spiral of despair and even from the long shadow of his past: "with the advent of the child who had sailed the seas with him on that wild adventure, there had begun to blow through his hot brain the first whisper of a clean and joyous breath [...] Now, at the little warm touch, his eyes were suddenly opened, and he saw the tainted memory in his heart as only a handful of dead dust, not worth the keeping [...] Here, close to him, touching him, smiling at him, enshrined in this child who had no past, shone the future, like something gallant and green with the dew on it, and blowing over it, that strong, fresh wind. The worthless burden he had carried for years fell from him. He too could have what René de Flavigny had" -- and of course what René, widowed tragically young, has is not a lover, but a sunny-tempered child who adores him, and is happy to devote almost as much of that ready affection to "M. le Chevalier" :-p
As for the sudden appearance of "Henri du Coudrais" as the viewpoint character at the start of the extremely short 'Book Four', I found myself actively confused by it! (Given that Raymonde is always referred to by her married name and her brother Henri is an extremely minor character --André I might have remembered, but not their surname-- I had really no idea who this was until he alluded to "my sister"...)
Book Four concludes the novel by a brief episode in which La Vireville sails over to Sark, proposes to the woman he met once and hasn't seen for over a year (and who has believed him dead for more than six months, an issue the scene really doesn't have space to address), almost immediately starts feeling insecure about whether she can really love a penniless cripple or not, and then survives a near-fatal voyage back to Guernsey with her help, which suffices to convince him. In fact this is basically the entire plot of a Mills & Boon novel, but stuffed into the space of two short chapters... and it makes for a very scrambling climax to a story in which romance has played very little part.
The actual writing of this section is as good as anything else the author has ever done.
But the sudden volte-face on La Vireville's part ("It was very strange to him now that he had not known this when he was with her more than a year ago") doesn't convince me, and the characters feel railroaded together as a result; the other passage, apart from the one with Anne, that sank suddenly home, was the painful comment that "Fortuné was very little used to introspection, and the thought shook him how easy it was, evidently, to delude oneself". *That* strikes a chord of remembered experience... but I don't think it's just the personal parallels that make me uncomfortable with the romance sub-plot in this novel, because I have a distinct memory of finding that element unsatisfactory when first I encountered the book, years before there could have been any relevance. It just feels contrived, in a way that Broster's work generally never does -- I can see how it is set up and how the clues are meant to be positioned, but the structure isn't working for me.
One thing I admire about the writing, looking back, is how the author evidently has a clear mental image of the customs and costumes of the era, but doesn't --unlike the clothes-porn of modern 'historical romance' writers-- inflict them on the reader save when there is some reason for the characters themselves to make an observation on something unusual (Anne-Hilarion's "small kerseymere breeches that reached so nearly to his armpits", and La Vireville's hair "clubbed and ribboned indeed, but somewhat disordered from the sea-wind"). And as a sometime sailor I appreciated the reference to sinking a perfectly serviceable boat along with her dead owner as having thrown away *two* lives! I'm not convinced by the mental image of acquiring a prosthetic hook as a workable replacement for an *above*-the-elbow amputation in the late 1790s, however, still less in the 1760s when La Vireville would have been a boy, however much he may have have envied the appendage of an old sailor at that era... Nelson certainly never had one.
It has been a long time since I read this book, mainly because the account of the Quiberon disaster (something that, one feels, would never have featured in Orczy's optimistic adventures) haunted me for years as a child. On this occasion I consciously picked it up again as a result of having read The Marquis of Carabas, which features an equally (probably more so, because Sabatini goes into the damning disagreement and back-biting among the commanders, while Broster gives us only the exhaustion and dwindling hope of those under their command) devastating version of Quiberon. That experience reminded me of the existence of "Sir Isumbras".
I always liked Fortuné de la Vireville (ironically named, as he himself points out), and rather resented it when Broster brought him back as a flamboyant minor character speaking quaint English for the purposes of her lesser novel "Ships in the Bay", which I read chiefly as a curiosity after having visited Fishguard. (I suspect she liked him too and wanted to show him happily married and getting up to adventurous things, but it doesn't feel at all like the same person, I'm afraid.) In "Sir Isumbras" he features as a sardonic and quick-witted adventurer with an unspoken tragedy in his past, and a soft spot for his friend René de Flavigny's small son, for whom in the course of the book he comes to feel an almost parental responsibility, a responsibility which ultimately gives him the will to survive at all costs...
On this reread for the first time I noticed the reason for that apparently random title, in the form of a quoted verse preceding the contents page:
"And als he wente by a woodë schawe,
Thare mette he with a lytille knave
Came rynnande him agayne—
'Gramercy, faire Syr Isumbras,
Have pitie on us in this case,
And lifte us uppe for Marie's grace!'
N'as never childe so fayne.
Theretoe of a mayden he was ware,
That over floude ne mighte not fare,
Sir Ysumbras stoopède him thare
And uppe ahent hem twayne."
Broster is fond of epigrams, most of which entirely escaped me during my initial reading of her work due to my inability to read them at that time. The quotations used in this book are not in French but from old ballads, but it sounds as if this episode of Sir Isumbras and the little boy is not actually part of the mediæval "Metrical Romance" to which it is credited, but was a Victorian pastiche created to accompany the Millais painting entitled "Sir Isumbras at the Ford". Evidently this picture was famous enough in its day for Broster to be able to refer to it with at least some expectation that the reader would recognise the allusion, but in the days before the Internet I had no notion whatsoever of its existence :-p
(And second-hand copies of the book are nowadays available astonishingly cheaply, when you consider the time and trouble that it took to obtain even one by contacting all the rare books dealers across the country in the days before the Internet: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/sir-isumbras-ford/author/broster/ )
Judging by the publication date and list of other works by the same author in my (1918) copy, this must have been Broster's first 'solo' work, after the two somewhat uneven books co-written with Gertrude Taylor (of which I prefer the earlier "Chantemerle" to "The Vision Splendid"; it is perhaps as well they broke up the writing partnership when they did, since the latter novel really is a bit disjointed in its subject matter). But much of "Sir Isumbras" is as good as anything she ever wrote.
The book has a slightly slow beginning, set, like that of the later "Marquis of Carabas" (and probably for the same reason), among the impoverished and disunited emigré society in exile in London, in which all the plotting serves no real purpose other than to get the Marquis de Flavigny out of the way on a fairly pointless errand to 'the Regent' in Verona. It dawned on me for the first time thanks to this re-reading that the mysterious Regent exists because the action takes place between the execution of the King and the death of the Dauphin -- which actually occurs in the background during the course of the novel -- and there is thus a nominal Regency in effect involving one of the adult members of the royal family, a detail of which I had had no idea... [Edit: in fact this is explicitly laid out in the first pages, in the midst of de Flavigny's story: now that King and Queen alike were done to death, their children captives and a Republic in being.... though the rightful little King might be close prisoner in the Temple, his uncles — the Comte de Provence (Regent in name of France) and the Comte d'Artois— were still at large. Which is an object lesson to writers, alas, as to how the readers may skip carefully laid-out background material in search of more character involvement.]
I note that 'the young Frenchman' René de Flavigny, is, in fact, as mentioned briefly at the start of the book, thirty-two! I suppose he feels very innocent and inexperienced to both Fortuné — only a few years older — and to his father-in-law, Mr Elphinstone.
The latter muses that "his son-in-law's tact and ability made him a very useful person to his own party and a person proportionately obnoxious to the other", but we don't really get any opportunity to see that in the course of this story. Contrary to our initial expectations, it is La Vireville — who appears at first only to be a minor character in the lives of René de Flavigny and the little boy Anne-Hilarion — who is to be the main protagonist, and the Marquis's supposed political significance is important only in providing a rationale for Anne to be kidnapped off to France by Republican agents in his absence, making it necessary for the Chevalier de la Vireville to set off in pursuit and thus setting in motion the adventures of the first third of the plot.
This section is the one closest in spirit to an Orczy adventure, as we have first of all the wonderful creation of the two saintly but sinister old ladies (one of the parts of the plot that I remembered most clearly from my original reading) who attempt to extract Royalist secrets from the little boy, who has no idea that they are not what they seem, and who in his innocence knows rather too much about his father's activities and about the double identity of La Vireville, also known as the guerilla Chouan leader "Monsieur Augustin". When the latter, all too well aware (as the hapless Mr Elphinstone was not) of the undercover activities of the de Chaulnes sisters, arrives post-haste to salvage Anne from their grasp, the little boy has already been carried off to France, not in the hopes as such of extracting very much further useful information from him under questioning, but as bait -- in the hopes that his father the Marquis de Flavigny can be induced to trade his own life in exchange for the liberty of his adored son, or at the very least can be lured into setting his head in the trap in some kind of rash rescue attempt.
This would, of course, be a stupidly quixotic thing to do. But in the Marquis's absence, La Vireville, no mere political plotter but a competent and invaluable guerilla fighter, finds himself on the spot as the next candidate in line for the role. "It was sheer insanity. He had no right to do it, for he knew his life to be a hundred times more valuable than a child's happiness. He could be very ill-spared in Northern Brittany, in Jersey..." All the same, he takes the devil's bargain that the old ladies offer, with every intention (as they no doubt suspect) of breaking his part of the exchange if he can. At the very least they can oblige him to sacrifice his valued incognito in the process, after Anne has already inadvertently betrayed it...
And then instead of the Sydney Carton situation we have been half-led to expect, there follows an extended serio-comic Scarlet-Pimpernel-type rescue and escape in disguise, as La Vireville very conveniently catches up with Anne's abductor despite the long start (the author eventually suggests a little weakly that Mme de Chaulnes' agent must have had 'secret business' of his own in Calais that caused him to delay their departure in a manner "providential from Fortuné's point of view") and attempts to return with the boy to English soil while carrying out the entirely unaccustomed duties of nursemaid to a six-year-old. Anne is an inconvenient but endearing companion whose presence is both a shield --for no-one expects a fugitive Chouan leader to be travelling with a small child-- and a complete giveaway for anyone in pursuit of the ill-assorted couple. And although the little boy is very attached to his escort and does his best to obey all the instructions he is given, it is hard for the Chevalier to anticipate in advance or for Anne to remember all the things he must *not* say... right down to the simple word 'Monsieur' instead of 'Citoyen'.
(In this early book, Broster adopts the old-fashioned expedient of using 'thou' to represent a switch into 'tu' by the French-speakers, something that she wisely eschews later on, but in fact in this context, where on its rare occurrences it pretty much universally refers to Anne-Hilarion ("Thy uncle wishes thee to drink the soup!" "The little one, thou seest, when he was with us at Kerdronan..."), it does just about work.)
In the second third of the book -- although in the author's own scheme of division it straddles Book Two ("The Road to England") and Book Three ("The Road that Few Returned On") -- the little boy is largely absent, and so is the touch of humour that has leavened the sometimes harrowing drama. La Vireville returns to active duty in France, first for his encounter with a murdered leader's 'agent de la correspondance', a term never actually translated but clearly representing some kind of contact/liaison officer, and secondly as part of the disastrously ill-organised Quiberon expedition, which ends, "as he had always known and expected... with his back to the wall and a firing party in front of him" in the mass prisoner executions that follow their surrender.
The agent de la correspondance at Porhoët is Raymonde de Guéfontaine, who like Avoye de Villecresne in "The Wounded Name" is no youthful ingénue but the widow of an arranged marriage. From the author's point of view, this presumably liberates her from the social constraints that might otherwise have been a problem, while in romantic terms it frees her from blushing inexperience without any overtones of trailing tragedy... or at least that is my guess as to the purpose of this plot device, since she will turn out to be the designated love interest :-( And that, unfortunately, is pretty much what it did feel like.
The existence of Raymonde, along with Quiberon, Anne and the old ladies, was one of the few points I remembered clearly about this novel when I had forgotten all the action and the entirety of Fortuné's backstory, but in her case what I solely remembered about her was disliking the love story. And as an adult, with more tolerance for the existence of romance, I'm afraid I found that it *still* didn't work for me -- I can see how the pairing is supposed to work out in theory, but it just didn't click.
On the face of it they ought to be a good match; Raymonde is as resourceful and adventurous as he is, and engaged in the same sort of undercover work at equal risk, as Avoye --for all her 'past exploit' that gives credibility to the idea that she might be in danger-- is not, and indeed the final 'bonding moment' between them in this book takes place thanks to the cooperation of shared survival. But I was an ardent partisan of Avoye, a far more conventional heroine, and of her affair with Aymar which, however peripheral to the action,is so central to the outcome of his story. I didn't dislike Raymonde de Guéfontaine as such, but I was simply not convinced by the way that she seemed to get shoe-horned in as a supposedly significant element in the protagonist's life at a very late stage, when to all appearances he has scarcely spared her a moment's thought, and has spent the interim in supposedly violent regret for another woman.
For it is as a part of the events at Quiberon that Fortuné de la Vireville's backstory is unfolded to the reader, though he has already previously been established, for all his courage and wry humour, as a man with bitter scars and a lost love in his past. And the revelations at that point failed to work for me either, with what felt like an almost physical jolt of disappointment. It ought to have been a laying-bare of a deeply private part of his soul, but instead it fell rather flat, and just didn't *fit*.
The moment, earlier on in the book, when, after saying goodbye to Anne-Hilarion, whom he has clearly come to love dearly, he lets slip the confession that "hers would have been like Anne" (and his mother responds only, without need for explanation, that a child of his own would have had darker hair), is heartbreaking in its loss and longing. I simply couldn't square that with the subsequent explanation that the woman he loves is not dead, nor even lost beyond recall, but merely, like that Lady Sophia who set Damerel on his course of dissipation in Georgette Heyer's "Venetia", a slut whose "noble degree hid the soul of a courtesan". And that just didn't match, for me, with the glimpses we'd had of his feeling for her (the remembrance of "a tie untimely snapped"), or with the image of a woman he *could* or would care hopelessly for.
The material with St.Four is oddly unsatisfactory, as well: La Vireville finds himself brought abruptly face to face with his former friend, then forced by the vicissitudes of war to work with him. The woman concerned has now betrayed them both, and St.Four clearly wants a reconciliation, but manages only to sacrifice his life offscreen in a rather perfunctory flashback; the whole thing ought to be a major turning point in the protagonist's journey, but with everything else going on it gets rushed over without leaving much impact. (And the whole business of the duel, as elaborated upon later, seems pointlessly over-complicated; in "The Yellow Poppy" there are good reasons, both practical and dramatic, for a pistol combat by lots, but here the only rationale appears to be so that Fortuné can have the advantage yet spare his opponent's life, which he could surely have done in any fight... while it's quite hard to acquire a superficial duelling scar by being shot in the face!)
His initial meeting with Madame de Guéfontaine is gripping stuff, culminating with her failed attempt to stab him in his sleep to avenge her dead brother. It's an episode for which he ultimately rather admires her rather than the reverse, and which will become a point of teasing between them in the end; what feels far more forced is the way that he then follows this up by launching a rescue attempt (which will cost him dearly) with very little coherent rationale, after she has attempted to betray him to the enemy. It doesn't come across as quixotic, but simply as completely unwarranted -- so far as we know she *hasn't* "bewitched" him, as his sullen follower Grain d'Orge complains, and he has no motive and certainly no right to cover up for her and then risk his own mission.
Once the mutual misunderstanding is explained, they get on very well (although not to the point where he shows any romantic interest in her). But unfortunately the plot requires the action to take place before any possibility of explanation, and to me it's a stretch.
After their parting, meanwhile, comes the whole business of Quiberon, and the encounter with St.Four that rakes up all the old memories that are shown to be very much alive; and to the Marquis de Flagny's family and friends back in England there come the first intimations of disaster, while La Vireville and the other survivors face the firing squad, and the tender mercies of Madame de Chaulnes once more. (This latter confrontation, again, never quite made sense to me; in terms of structure we instinctively expect that "devil's bargain" that the Chevalier made at the start --and then seemingly side-stepped so easily-- to come back with eventual consequences, but Madame de Chaulnes' motive for aborting the execution in order to question him appears weirdly trivial, and her eventual "pretty taste in vengeance" rather anti-climactic. It's another place where I can see the mechanics of the plot being worked out, but the result doesn't arise instinctively in the way that, say, La Vireville's promise to his dying friend does that he will do his best to save himself in order to raise Anne as his own son...)
I still don't understand the author's choice of structure, in which Book Three carries on almost to the end, to be followed by a very truncated Book 4; for me this middle third of the book finished naturally at the chapter-end that represents that execution --the final aftermath of Quiberon-- when we cut away from the protagonist's view at the last moment, and an instant later those who heard it "crossed themselves at the sound of that volley". (And while Broster has form in disposing of her protagonists, especially in the early books --Gilbert in "Chantemerle" and Horatia's Armand in "The Vision Splendid" both die before the final resolution of the plot-- it's a very unexpected outcome to kill off the main viewpoint character in a book that has been so centred around him as this one. While "The Yellow Poppy" is shared between the stories of Gaston and Valentine and "The Flight of the Heron" alternates evenly between Windham and Ewen Cameron, "Sir Isumbras" has definitely been the story of Fortuné de la Vireville and not, for instance, of Anne-Hilarion de Flavigny, however much the little boy features in the plot, still less that of Raymonde de Guéfontaine, who has appeared so far only in a single disconnected episode of the Chevalier's adventures, a hundred pages previously!)
But Raymonde features largely in the next two chapters; the adventures are ended, and the subject matter of the final third of the book is their psychological aftermath. She and Anne-Hilarion meet at last in their common grief, and the author does manage to convince me that Raymonde, during their brief acquaintance or thereafter, has fallen in love with La Vireville, lean and quick and half-mocking, who "would do the most unexpected things with an air of being amused by them", and realises it only when it is too late. The scene where she dreams of his ghost again at Porhoët in company with her brother, both bearing their fatal wounds --Mes morts, the outcry for her beloved dead-- holds an aching power.
And it is only after *that* that Broster reveals that --though hitherto we have had not the slightest suspicion of it-- although so many have died at Quiberon, La Vireville, by a series of miracles[†] and his own determination, is not in fact one of them.
† to which the author appends a footnote that a similar escape was a matter of historical fact.
Instead he has spent the last few months severely ill and with convenient amnesia (the confusion not assisted by the fact that his instinctive response, in his half-delirious state, was to give his Breton nom de guerre rather than his family name) due to the injuries --and subsequent amputation-- he incurred whilst escaping. His slow recovery is buoyed up by the thought that Anne-Hilarion will need him now that René de Flavigny is dead, which sows an appalling twist of guilt into the discovery that the Marquis has also survived.
Why had he put himself to the agony of that derelict voyage to Houat and the long suffering that came after? Mostly because of his promise to his friend, and because he thought Anne wanted him... or because he wanted Anne. But he was not needed, neither by the boy or by anyone. He had built a foolish dream on the assumption of René's death, which to him had seemed a certainty. The dream had proved baseless, like everything else, and all it had done was to plant in his sincere thankfulness for René's escape a thorn of regret which was horrible to him, and made him, who had suffered so bitterly from treachery, feel a traitor himself.
Only in addition to this fresh offshoot of the relationship between him and the boy that has been gradually established throughout the whole novel, we suddenly get the statement that he is obsessed by love for Raymonde de Guéfontaine, a process which is now said to have begun after his escape at Quiberon, when "she, with her high courage and her ideals of devotion, would never counsel him to lie here like a coward until he was found and shot". Unfortunately when this happens 355 pages into a 386-page novel, it comes as an extreme afterthought, especially from someone who has been steadfastly faithful against all reason to someone else as a major theme of the rest of the book.
I'm afraid that for me what rings markedly more true is the scene where it is the unexpected arrival after all of Anne (despite the fact that it is supposedly the news he brings about Raymonde) which liberates La Vireville from his spiral of despair and even from the long shadow of his past: "with the advent of the child who had sailed the seas with him on that wild adventure, there had begun to blow through his hot brain the first whisper of a clean and joyous breath [...] Now, at the little warm touch, his eyes were suddenly opened, and he saw the tainted memory in his heart as only a handful of dead dust, not worth the keeping [...] Here, close to him, touching him, smiling at him, enshrined in this child who had no past, shone the future, like something gallant and green with the dew on it, and blowing over it, that strong, fresh wind. The worthless burden he had carried for years fell from him. He too could have what René de Flavigny had" -- and of course what René, widowed tragically young, has is not a lover, but a sunny-tempered child who adores him, and is happy to devote almost as much of that ready affection to "M. le Chevalier" :-p
As for the sudden appearance of "Henri du Coudrais" as the viewpoint character at the start of the extremely short 'Book Four', I found myself actively confused by it! (Given that Raymonde is always referred to by her married name and her brother Henri is an extremely minor character --André I might have remembered, but not their surname-- I had really no idea who this was until he alluded to "my sister"...)
Book Four concludes the novel by a brief episode in which La Vireville sails over to Sark, proposes to the woman he met once and hasn't seen for over a year (and who has believed him dead for more than six months, an issue the scene really doesn't have space to address), almost immediately starts feeling insecure about whether she can really love a penniless cripple or not, and then survives a near-fatal voyage back to Guernsey with her help, which suffices to convince him. In fact this is basically the entire plot of a Mills & Boon novel, but stuffed into the space of two short chapters... and it makes for a very scrambling climax to a story in which romance has played very little part.
The actual writing of this section is as good as anything else the author has ever done.
"He waited for her outside, leaning upon the low, whitewashed wall, over which the tamarisk whispered with its feathery foliage. Breaths of the gorse came to him even here, and the whole warm air was vibrating with the lark's ecstasy. And Fortuné could hardly believe his happiness, so strange a thing to him"
"Meanwhile she toiled there, crouched in the bottom of the boat, her wet hair blown in streaks across her face, while he kept the boat's head as much to the seas as he dared, only easing the helm on the approach of a wave that seemed heavy enough to drive her bows under"
But the sudden volte-face on La Vireville's part ("It was very strange to him now that he had not known this when he was with her more than a year ago") doesn't convince me, and the characters feel railroaded together as a result; the other passage, apart from the one with Anne, that sank suddenly home, was the painful comment that "Fortuné was very little used to introspection, and the thought shook him how easy it was, evidently, to delude oneself". *That* strikes a chord of remembered experience... but I don't think it's just the personal parallels that make me uncomfortable with the romance sub-plot in this novel, because I have a distinct memory of finding that element unsatisfactory when first I encountered the book, years before there could have been any relevance. It just feels contrived, in a way that Broster's work generally never does -- I can see how it is set up and how the clues are meant to be positioned, but the structure isn't working for me.
One thing I admire about the writing, looking back, is how the author evidently has a clear mental image of the customs and costumes of the era, but doesn't --unlike the clothes-porn of modern 'historical romance' writers-- inflict them on the reader save when there is some reason for the characters themselves to make an observation on something unusual (Anne-Hilarion's "small kerseymere breeches that reached so nearly to his armpits", and La Vireville's hair "clubbed and ribboned indeed, but somewhat disordered from the sea-wind"). And as a sometime sailor I appreciated the reference to sinking a perfectly serviceable boat along with her dead owner as having thrown away *two* lives! I'm not convinced by the mental image of acquiring a prosthetic hook as a workable replacement for an *above*-the-elbow amputation in the late 1790s, however, still less in the 1760s when La Vireville would have been a boy, however much he may have have envied the appendage of an old sailor at that era... Nelson certainly never had one.