Return of the Hero

This comic romance is set in the early years of Napoleon’s heyday. The First Empire asserted France’s new authority against Europe and promoted a new aristocracy, however seediy it seemed compared to the past. 

Against that heroic backdrop Captain Neuville plays a cowardly fraud who abandons his unit in war, abandons his fiancee, then returns to pretend to a false heroism. How rotten is he? The other stagecoach passengers can’t bear him. Yet the entire society succumbs to his ridiculous bragging. The hard headed businessmen beg to be conned by him.

His moral antithesis is his fiancee’s older sister, Elizabeth Beaugrand. She and her family seem straight out of Jane Austen. The heroine stands apart in wisdom, insight and character against a family and society of silly, greedy fops. Even her sister’s naive innocence betrays a sordid appetite. 

 Elizabeth too has indulged in fraud. To spare her sister’s despair Elizabeth writes her loving letters in Neuville’s name, maintaining his pretence to care and creating a heroic, widely successful version of the cowardly failure. Later she unleashes a series of schemes to defeat him, stopping only when his danger threatens death.

Like so many Benedicks and Beatrices before them, the sprightly snipers end up together. For all the film’s putative reference to its historical particularity, its satiric target ranges far more widely, of course, beyond 19th Century France, even beyond contemporary Europe. For, alas, the rampant spread of false honour, the seduction of the gullible, the grab for power by individuals or by states on the basis of false pretences — that is all quite too common in the current world. And that — not 19th Century France — is this satire’s target.
     Fake heroes.