This story told in the first person has as its frame Louis XVIII of France’s retreat to Ghent; it encloses the récit (flashback) of the battalion commander, who in earlier life had been a naval captain.
His widow loses her reason and is cared for by the battalion commander, who resigns from the naval service to become a soldier and who takes her with him on his campaigns in a small cart pulled by a mule.
“La Veillée de Vincennes” The frame-narrator, writing from the standpoint of 1819, recounts the Adjutant Mathurin’s story of his youthful (anachronistic) friendship with the future playwright Michel-Jean Sedaine and of his young future wife Pierrette’s introduction in 1778 to the court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, when Princess Marie Louise of Savoy, Princesse de Lamballe, paints her portrait.
“La Canne de jonc” The frame-narrator, writing from the standpoint of 1832, describes how in July 1830 he had met up again with a brother officer, Captain Renaud.
Vigny, like Honoré de Balzac in La Rabouilleuse, is aware that the concept of honour is vanishing from the modern world, as too is the supremacy of religion.
It pained Vigny to accompany Louis XVIII of France on his withdrawal to the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, rather than have the glory of confronting Napoleon I’s invading army.
In “le naufrage universel des croyances”,[3] which he sees as characteristic of the modern era (and especially of the July Monarchy), he hopes for a religion of honour that will establish the civic virtues of personal responsibility, stoicism, self-abnegation and unselfish regard for others.
[5] However, in proposing his concept of a “religion of honour”, he does not resolve the contradiction between absolute obedience to orders that can result in killing and the autonomous integrity of the categorical imperative which embodies the demands of conscience.
In its endeavour to set forth a modern, sober ideal of the soldier of conscience it is far removed from the gung-ho attitude of most books on warfare and military life.
Historian Mark Mazower has written that the book is "An immortal depiction - gripping and vivid yet unsparingly unsentimental - of a generation forced to question as never before the place of war and the military values in modern life.
"[9] In a 2013 article for the Financial Times, Mazower wrote that Vigny's work is still relevant, with Europe and to a lesser extent the U.S. currently facing decreased public support for the military, just as was the case in France after the Napoleonic wars.