De Vigny wrote relatively little, particularly when compared with contemporaries such as Hugo and Dumas, but he was a far more scrupulous "literary artist than either. He arrived at manhood just a year or two too late to be caught up in the maelstrom of the Napoleonic age; in any case, his royalist and aristocratic background might have prohibited him for fighting in the armies of an upstart Emperor. So when he came to join the French army under the Hourbons, the national dreams of gloire were past, and before he finally resigned his commission, de Vigny had served for years in dull garrison postings and endured the boredom of peacetime barracks routine and military bureaucracy, servitude et grandeur militaires was born of these years, and though it is a short book (the Penguin edition runs to 186 pages sums up the outlook of a whole, disenchanted generation and anticipates most modern attitudes to war and soldiering. De Vigny does not write about heroes, his characters - mostly ageing soldiers - have not won fame or promotion, and while they are brave and stoical and self reliant, they are also resigned emotionally and have few illusions left. He is the classicist of the French Romantic movement, pure and restrained in his language, objective in his psychology, averse to melodrama and exaggeration, with a profound sense of history braced by intellectual stoicism. Yet he can also rise to moments of genuine intensity and drama, as in the extraordinary scene - allegedly described by an eye witness - of the confrontation between Napoleon and the Pope, or the tragic plight of the two teenage lovers in The Story of the Red Seal. Though there have been various translations over the years, English readers have been strangely slow to react to this prose masterpiece by one of the great French poets.