Editor's Note: Magnan appears in almost all of the Retief stories. He provides the ongoing comic relief—the "straight man," as it were, for Retief's wit and sarcasm. In the first three stories, however, Magnan is not quite the unmitigated ass he becomes as time goes on. Not that all the raw material isn't there from the very beginning, of course, but early in his career Magnan does show occasional flashes of spirit. An example is the scene in "The Brass God" where Magnan, reacting in a quick and decisive manner which he will soon relinquish, stuffs a cummerbund into the mouth of a Hoogan priest.
Soon enough, however, Magnan adapts completely to the culture of the Corps Diplomatique. From then on, his rise is more or less uninterrupted as Retief's career continues to stagnate due to his awkward habit of ignoring CDT precepts.
Insofar as the Retief stories have an overall architecture, it is provided by two themes: the steady rise of Magnan—who only gets his "just desserts" at the very end of Retief's career, as told in Diplomat-at-Arms—and the emergence of the Groaci as Retief's major antagonist (outside, of course, of the ranks of the CDT itself).
In Part III, we examine the first of these.