Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari

Cavagnari entered East India Company military service and later worked as a political officer on the north-west frontier. During the Second Anglo-Afghan War he negotiated the Treaty of Gandamak with Mohammad Yaqub Khan, which provided for a permanent British representative at Kabul.

He became that representative and entered Kabul with a small escort from the Corps of Guides. On 3 September 1879, Afghan troops attacked the Residency after a dispute over pay, killing Cavagnari and the entire mission. The Far Pavilions incorporates him and the siege into its final historical sequence.

In M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions, The final section incorporates the historical Kabul mission of Sir Louis Cavagnari and Walter Hamilton and the destruction of the British Residency in September 1879.