About This Book "Haven't you heard of the duel going on ever since 1801?" An exciting, swashbuckling thriller based on a true story about two of Napoleon’s soldiers. Conrad’s brilliantly ironic tale about two officers in Napoleon’s Grand Army who, under a futile pretext, fought an on-going series of duels throughout the Napoleanic Wars. Over decades, on every occasion they chanced to meet, they fought. Both satiric and deeply sad, this masterful tale treats both the futility of war and the absurdity of false honor, war’s necessary accessory. This Is A Melville House “HybridBook” HybridBooks are a union of print and electronic Purchasers of this print edition also receive Illuminations—additional curated material that expand the world of Conrad's novella through text and illustrations—at no additional charge. To obtain the Illuminations for The Duel by Joseph Conrad, simply scan the QR code (or follow a url) found at the back of the print book, which leads to a page where you can download a file for your preferred electronic reading device. "Illuminations" contains writings by Napoleon Bonaparte - Catherine Bearne - Captain Elzear Blaze - Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourienne - Richard Curle - And a historical appreciation of the real life Feraud and d'Hubert Full-color illustrations Jacques-Louis David - Jean-Antoine Gros - Johannes Flintoe - Johann Gottfried Schadow - James Gillroy and others. Also “The Code A Diverse Anthology For Personal Use ” which includes in their entirety the French, Irish and American Southern C ode Duellos as well as the Queensbury Rules and a description of the Viking Holmganga .
Author
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski ) was a Polish-born English novelist who today is most famous for Heart of Darkness, his fictionalized account of Colonial Africa. Conrad left his native Poland in his middle teens to avoid conscription into the Russian Army. He joined the French Merchant Marine and briefly employed himself as a wartime gunrunner. He then began to work aboard British ships, learning English from his shipmates. He was made a Master Mariner, and served more than sixteen years before an event inspired him to try his hand at writing. He was hired to take a steamship into Africa, and according to Conrad, the experience of seeing firsthand the horrors of colonial rule left him a changed man. Joseph Conrad settled in England in 1894, the year before he published his first novel. He was deeply interested in a small number of writers both in French and English whose work he studied carefully. This was useful when, because a need to come to terms with his experience, lead him to write Heart of Darkness, in 1899, which was followed by other fictionalized explorations of his life. He has been lauded as one of the most powerful, insightful, and disturbing novelists in the English canon despite coming to English later in life, which allowed him to combine it with the sensibilities of French, Russian, and Polish literature.
