Brigadier Gerard Brigadier Gerard Brigadier Gerard is the hero of a series of 17 historical short stories, a play, and a major character in a novel by the British writer Arthur Conan Doyle. The hero, Etienne Gerard, is a Hussar officer in the French Army during the Napoleonic Wars. Gerard's most notable attribute is his vanity – he is utterly convinced that he is the bravest soldier, greatest swordsman, most accomplished horseman and most gallant lover in all France. Gerard is not entirely wrong, since he displays notable bravery on many occasions, but his self-satisfaction undercuts this quite often. Obsessed with honour
Brigadier Gerard wrote with great affection about Marbot's memoirs in "Through the Magic Door". He also drew on other contemporary sources, writing in an author's preface that "readers of Marbot, de Gonneville, Coignet, de Fenezac, Bourgogne, and the other French soldiers who have recorded their reminiscences of the Napoleonic campaigns will recognise the fountain from which I have drawn the adventures of Etienne Gerard." The fictional Gerard is not to be confused with the real Napoleonic officer Étienne Maurice Gérard (1777–1852), who rose to become a Marshal and later Prime Minister of France. The stories were originally published in the "Strand Magazine"