u want any witnesses, I’ll send word to the old girl to put her head out of a window at the back. Stay! There’s the gardener. He’ll do. He’s as deaf as a post, but he has two eyes in his head.”
A subsequent interaction with the maid suggests that she is scared of Feraud but not of D’Hubert:
The pretty maid had opened the door. Lieut. Feraud brushed past her brusquely, and she raised her scared and questioning eyes to Lieut. D’Hubert, who could do nothing but shrug his shoulders slightly as he followed with marked reluctance.
Compare the brief clause “which at first was repulsed violently” with the detailed description of the maid’s behaviour after the first duel, when she mistakenly believes that D’Hubert intends to kill the wounded Feraud:
The affair was ugly enough as it stood, and Lieut. D’Hubert addressed himself at once to the task of stopping the bleeding. In this task it was his fate to be ridiculously impeded by the pretty maid. Rending the air with screams of horror, she attacked him from behind and, twining her fingers in his hair, tugged back at his head. Why she should choose to hinder him at this precise moment he could not in the least understand. He did not try. It was all like a very wicked and harassing dream. Twice to save himself from being pulled over he had to rise and fling her off. He did this stoically, without a word, kneeling down again at once to go on with his work. But the third time, his work being done, he seized her and held her arms pinned to her body. Her cap was half off, her face was red, her eyes blazed with crazy boldness. He looked mildly into them while she called him a wretch, a traitor, and a murderer many times in succession.
If the reader were expected to believe that D’Hubert raped the maid, then surely Conrad would have written a description more like this one.
The first part of ‘The Duel’ is set in Strasbourg in “a short interval of peace”. A cavalry officer might be reckless about rape in enemy territory during wartime, but it was a different matter in a city in peacetime France where he would risk discovery and court-martial. In particular, after the maid attacks D’Hubert he is worried for his reputation:
This did not annoy him so much as the conviction that she had managed to scratch his face abundantly. Ridicule would be added to the scandal of the story. He imagined the adorned tale making its way through the garrison of the town, through the whole army on the frontier, with every possible distortion of motive and sentiment and circumstance, spreading a doubt upon the sanity of his conduct and the distinction of his taste even to the very ears of his honourable family.
To try to understand what readers might have expected to encounter, here are some passages describing rapes and attempted rapes in works approximately contemporary with ‘The Duel’.
In The Man of Property (1906) by John Galsworthy, Irene Forsyte refuses consent to her husband Soames:
He answered: “I want to know how long this state of things between us is to last? I have put up with it long enough.”
“Will you please leave my room?”
“Will you treat me as your husband?”
“Then, I shall take steps to make you.”
And then a couple of chapters later he rapes her:
The morning after a certain night on which Soames at last asserted his rights and acted like a man, he breakfasted alone.
He breakfasted by gaslight, the fog of late November wrapping the town as in some monstrous blanket till the trees of the Square even were barely visible from the dining-room window.
He ate steadily, but at times a sensation as though he could not swallow attacked him. Had he been right to yield to his overmastering hunger of the night before, and break down the resistance which he had suffered now too long from this woman who was his lawful and solemnly constituted helpmate?
He was strangely haunted by the recollection of her face, from before which, to soothe her, he had tried to pull her hands—of her terrible smothered sobbing, the like of which he had never heard, and still seemed to hear; and he was still haunted by the odd, into