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The Encyclopedia
of Fantastic Victoriana
Sample Entry
CIGARETTE.
Cigarette was created by Ouida and appeared in Under Two Flags
(1867). Ouida, neé Marie Louise de la Remée (1839-1908), was for
three decades one of the most successful and effective popular writers
in Britain. She wrote forty‑four novels and collections of stories and
drew praise from the likes of Edward Bulwer‑Lytton and even Henry James,
but by the 1890s the vogue for her work had passed and she died
penniless. (She lives on as the model for Lucia in E.F. Benson's "Mapp
and Lucia" novels.) Under Two Flags is her best‑known work.
Under Two
Flags is about Bertie Cecil, a young British noble who is a member
of the First Life Guards, a cavalry unit. Bertie's life is ever so
tiresome. His languid personality is just so strained by the sheer
effort of being Bertie, or "Beauty," as his friends and admirers call
him. The horse races, the hunting, being the darling of the fast and
first sets, it is all such a bother. Bertie is popular and handsome,
admired by his male friends and the object of universal female
admiration. His life is nearly perfect except for two difficulties: he
has next to no money, and to live properly, that is, with the best of
everything, and to gamble as a man should merely worsens his debts; and
his younger brother Berkeley has a bad gambling problem and worse debts.
Bertie eventually loses all he has on a horse race—he staked everything
on his beloved horse Forest King, but one of Bertie's enemies, a welsher
who Bertie humiliated, drugged Forest King so that he ran badly—and
almost simultaneously discovers that Berkeley forged Bertie's name on a
bill. Bertie could reveal that he did not sign the bill, but he could
only do so by revealing that at the time the bill was forged he was with
the Countess Guenevere, a married woman. Bertie won't allow himself to
ruin the good name of Guenevere as well as that of his brother, and so
Bertie flees, accepting disgrace for himself in the place of Guenevere
and Berkeley. Bertie goes to Algeria and joins the Chasseurs
d'Afrique. Twelve years pass, in which he establishes himself as one
of the Chasseurs' best soldiers. Then he meets the delightful
gamine Cigarette, the darling of the Chasseurs. He endures
deprivation, hardship, wounds, the combat deaths of friends, the death
of his father while he himself is far away from his family, and the
brutality of his commander, Châteauroy, until Cigarette sacrifices
herself for Bertie—she has fallen in love with Bertie, although he does
not reciprocate—and Berkeley, who has encountered Cigarette in the
streets, is shamed by her into revealing that it was he, not Bertie, who
signed the bill. Bertie is restored to his title, he marries the
Princess Venetia Corona, who he fell in love with while in Africa, and
Bertie and Venetia live happily ever after.
Under Two
Flags is the archetypal "French Foreign Legion novel." P.C. Wren's
Beau Geste (1924) is the best known Foreign Legion novel and the
one most often filmed and parodied, but Under Two Flags preceded
it by over fifty years and was enormously popular and influential, both
at the time and for years afterwards. Although Wren never admitted being
influenced by Ouida, Under Two Flags was still being read by
schoolboys when Wren was a child, and virtually all of the important
aspects of Beau Geste are to be found in Under Two Flags.
(It must be said that Under Two Flags is not about the French
Foreign Legion, but rather about the Chasseurs d'Afrique, a light
cavalry troop founded in 1831 to hunt and kill mounted Algerian Arab
insurgents. The Legion were the scum of Europe; the Chasseurs
were noble gentlemen.)
Under Two
Flags is not well written. Strictly speaking, it is not even a good
book. It is too long by about a third. Ouida repeats herself; too many
of her descriptions are long lists of items, sensations, or names,
designed to let the reader know how well acquainted Ouida is with the
fashionable things of the fast set. Ouida seems to think that if one
example or sentence clause is good, four or five will automatically be
better. Everyone talks too much, in great rambling monologues and
speeches; Cigarette's dying farewell stretches across five pages.
Ouida's characters are in many ways cartoons, so that Bertie is
unrealistically noble, the Princess Venetia is the epitome of
aristocratic breeding and kindness, Bertie's servant Rake is the perfect
example of a slavishly devoted underling, and Cigarette is the very
definition of brio.
Ouida's father,
who she worshiped, abandoned her, and so Ouida seems to be using
Under Two Flags to work out her daddy issues. Everyone in the novel
worships Bertie, as Ouida clearly does. Cigarette proves her great love
to Bertie just as Ouida wanted to but never could to her own father. In
fiction written by amateurs or first-time writers, whether published in
fan magazines, vanity presses, or on the Internet as "fan fiction"
(stories written by fans featuring characters from their favorite books,
television shows, or movies), a common phenomenon is the "Mary Sue"
character. A Mary Sue character is an idealized stand‑in for the author,
and is tougher, smarter, cooler, nicer, sweeter, more charming, more
capable, and more skilled than the established characters, and becomes
worshiped by them. Although Mary Sues appeared in 19th
century magazine stories written by teenagers, as in stories where a
teenaged girl saves a sleeping Indian chief from being mauled by a bear
or is raised by Indians and becomes their leader, the traditional modern
Mary Sue appears in Star Trek fan fiction, where a new ensign on
the starship Enterprise is a better pilot than Captain Kirk,
smarter than Spock, and makes both fall in love with her. Cigarette is
Ouida's Mary Sue.
Bertie's
affected languor is genuine, a reflection of the behavior of upper-class
young British men, especially military officers, of the early and mid-19th
century, but it comes off as a pose, and an extremely annoying one. In
addition, a strain of anti-Semitism runs through Under Two Flags.
Ouida's class biases are overt; Bertie, and those of his class, are
innately superior, so that not only do the lower classes worship them
simply for being themselves, and are happy to do so, but the mere
presence of Bertie begins to reform even the most brutish and criminal
of the Chasseurs.
The list goes
on. And yet in a very real sense these flaws not only do not matter but
are beside the point. Under Two Flags is an immensely successful
bad novel. It was successful financially, for it was a bestseller many
times over and remains in print today. It was successful historically,
for the genre of French Foreign Legion stories begins with Under Two
Flags. And it is successful as a reading experience. Under Two
Flags can and will annoy the modern reader. Ouida's stylistic
failings will be irritating. Readers will react negatively to Bertie
simply because he is so much the subject of Ouida's hero worship. But
readers will be affected by Under Two Flags, and if they let
themselves be drawn into it, accept that the book is not well‑written,
set aside their critical faculties and simply enjoy the novel as an
overwrought melodramatic romance, they will be rewarded with a
compelling and sometimes moving experience. The emotion evoked in
Under Two Flags is not of the exquisite, refined variety; Ouida
could not write in the Henry James mode, and did not try. But Ouida
succeeds at the over-the-top moments and the melodramatic emotion,
premier among them the moments leading up to Cigarette's death. Bertie
faces death by the firing squad for a crime he did not commit, and
Cigarette has acquired his pardon, and so she rides all night at
breakneck speed across the desert to rescue him. Her horse spent, she
surrenders herself to her enemies, the Arabs, telling them that they can
torture her to death if only they deliver Bertie's pardon in time. The
Arabs, touched by her willing martyrdom, send her on her way, complete
with a fresh horse. Cigarette arrives in time to save Bertie by throwing
herself in front of his firing squad and taking the musket balls meant
for him. The sequence is melodramatic and purple and splendid. The
cumulative weight of the characterization of Bertie and Cigarette—and
for all her other faults Ouida vividly draws her characters (they may be
irritating, but they are memorable)—almost irresistibly leads the reader
to sympathize with them. The reader comes to identify with Bertie and
Cigarette, and, even with their unrealities and more annoying traits,
comes to see their goodness and even nobility of spirit, and to wish
them well, and so will be moved by Bertie's sacrifice and the miseries
and sorrows he must endure.
Bertie
eventually gains the reader's sympathies. Cigarette wins the reader's
affections almost immediately. She is a camp follower for the
Chasseurs, but she is no whore. Rather, she is the Chasseurs'
mascot and mother figure. Her mother was a camp follower and her father
a soldier unknown to her. She was an infant during the 1848 revolt in
Paris, sitting on the barriers and laughing as "La Marseilles" was sung
and the bullets flew. After that she wandered to Africa with her mother,
and then, after her mother's death, Cigarette attached herself to the
Chasseurs. She is seventeen years old during the events of Under
Two Flags. She is a patriot for France, devoted not to the
government or the upper classes but to the people, to the soldiers, and
to the country itself, and when she wins the Cross of the Legion of
Honour, for gallantry on the battlefield, it is the crowning moment of
her life and something she has dreamed about from when she was young.
She is
attractive:
She was very
pretty, audaciously pretty, though her skin was burned to a bright
sunny brown, and her hair was cut as short as a boy's and her face
had not one regular feature in it. But then—regularity! who wanted
it, who would have thought the most pure classic type a change for
the better, with those dark, dancing challenging eyes; with that
arch, brilliant, kitten-like face, so sunny, so mignon, and those
scarlet lips like a bud of camellia that were never so handsome as
when a cigarette was between them.
But it is her
personality which is most attractive:
She would eat a
succulent duck, thinking it all the spicier because it had been a
soldier's 'loot'; she would wear the gold plunder off dead Arabs'
dress, and never have a pang of conscience with it; she would dance
all night long, when she had a chance, like a little Bacchante; she
would shoot a man, if need be, with all the nonchalance in the
world. She had had a thousand lovers, from handsome Marquises of the
Guides to tawny black-browed scoundrels in the Zouaves, and she had
never loved anything, except the roll of the pas de charge, and the
sight of her own arch defiant face, with its scarlet lips and its
short jetty hair, when she saw it by chance in some burnished
cuirass, that served her for a mirror.
Cigarette is
beloved of the Chasseurs, feared and respected by the Arabs, a
"swearing, killing, fighting, laughing, dancing bastard heroine," and a
woman who can ride like a cavalryman, drink like a Zouave, and fight
like a Chasseur.
Under Two
Flags is not Art. It has many faults. But it is wonderful reading
nonetheless, and Cigarette is an immortal.
© 2005 Jess
Nevins |
