Les aventures de Jack Aubrey: Maître à bord - Capitaine de vaisseau

by Patrick O'Brian, Jean-Charles Provost (Translator), Hubert Prolongeau (Preface)

Un salon de musique, en 1800. On y écoute le quatuor en ut majeur de Locatelli. L'un des auditeurs bat la mesure. Cela indispose son voisin, un jeune homme triste et pauvre, qui lui donne un coup de poing dans les côtes. L'affront doit être lavé. Ainsi, avec l'un de ces duels qui avaient déjà guidé d'Artagnan vers les Mousquetaires, naît une amitié hors du commun entre Jack Aubrey, lieutenant puis capitaine de la Royal Navy à l'époque des guerres napoléoniennes, et le Dr Stephen Maturin, chirurgien, ornithologue et agent secret de Sa Très Gracieuse Majesté. Réunis en un seul volume, les deux premiers tomes d'une oeuvre pleine de finesse et d'humour au succès mondial.

1152 pages, Pocket Book

Published February 8, 2023

About the author

Patrick O'Brian was an English novelist and translator whose reputation rests above all on the Aubrey-Maturin novels, a twenty-volume sequence set during the Napoleonic Wars. The books follow Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and Stephen Maturin, his friend and ship's surgeon, whose Irish-Catalan background and scientific interests complement Aubrey's practical naval outlook. Beginning with Master and Commander, the series combines historical events with fictional adventures, preserving the outcome of real history while placing its protagonists within the action. O'Brian's command of period language, naval terminology, medical detail, and maritime practice gives the novels a convincing sense of nineteenth-century life, while their humor and the evolving relationship between Aubrey and Maturin provide their emotional center. The series became a long-form narrative in which professional duties and private lives develop continuously across successive voyages. O'Brian's literary career began remarkably early. Writing as Richard Patrick Russ, he published his first novel, Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda-Leopard, as a teenager, followed by animal stories collected in Beasts Royal. His novel Hussein: An Entertainment appeared in 1938 and received critical attention. After the Second World War, he adopted the name Patrick O'Brian and continued publishing fiction, including The Last Pool, Testimonies, and The Catalans. His early naval novels for younger readers, The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore, already contained elements that anticipated Aubrey and Maturin. He also became a translator from French, producing more than thirty English translations, including works by Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Charriere, and Jean Lacouture. His nonfiction included biographies of the naturalist Joseph Banks and the painter Pablo Picasso, whom he knew in Collioure, France. O'Brian lived in Wales after the war before moving with his wife Mary to Collioure in 1949. Their collaboration was important to his working life, with Mary assisting him in research and preparing his handwritten manuscripts for publication. O'Brian wrote by hand throughout his career and resisted modern writing technology. His literary breakthrough came unusually late. Although the Aubrey-Maturin books had a modest British following after their first appearance, their American revival in the early 1990s, led by W. W. Norton, brought sales and recognition. The novels eventually sold millions of copies and attracted devoted readers well beyond the age group normally associated with historical adventure fiction. O'Brian received the inaugural Heywood Hill Literary Prize in 1995, an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin, and a CBE in 1997. His reputation was complicated when British media revealed details of his early identity and first marriage, matters he had kept private. Despite the controversy, his fiction remained central to his legacy. His unfinished twenty-first Aubrey-Maturin novel was published posthumously, preserving both handwritten pages and typescript. His manuscripts, notes, and research materials have since become part of major literary collections. His influence is also reflected in the continued readership of the novels and the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, which drew primarily from The Far Side of the World while incorporating material from elsewhere in the series.