Point of Honor

What begins as a minor social insult snowballs into a fifteen-year obsession that consumes two French hussar officers during the Napoleonic Wars. When D'Hubert is sent to deliver a mild reprimand to the hotheaded Feraud, a trivial misunderstanding ignites a demand for satisfaction, and then another, and another, each duel spawning new grievances until neither man can remember what they were fighting about in the first place. All they know is that they must meet again. Conrad transforms what could be a simple tale of military honor into a darkly comic meditation on masculine pride and the absurdity of wounded vanity. Feraud pursues his adversary across battlefields and continents with the tenacity of a curse, while D'Hubert, initially the voice of reason, finds himself trapped by his own inability to simply walk away. The Napoleonic Wars surge around them, retreats, campaigns, the fall of an empire, yet these violent men remain locked in their private, escalating war. It is a brilliant expose of how pride becomes a cage, how honor devours its adherents, and how some feuds can only end when there is nothing left. Conrad at his most economical and incisive, Point of Honor asks what men will destroy in the name of dignity. For readers who crave psychological complexity, dark humor, and the terrible wastes of pointless conflict.