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    The Scarlet Pimpernel
    The Scarlet Pimpernel
    The Scarlet Pimpernel
    Ebook339 pages5 hours

    The Scarlet Pimpernel

    By Baroness Orczy and Hilary Mantel

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    About this ebook

    Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector’s Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector’s Library are books to love and treasure.

    The French Revolution is in full swing and the aristocracy are being sent to the guillotine in their hundreds. In the shadows, English dandy Sir Peter Blakeney – working under his alter ego, the Scarlet Pimpernel – is breaking the condemned out of prison and leaving his distinctive calling card, a picture of a red flower, to torment the French authorities. A master of disguise, infamous escape artist and flamboyant swordsman, his identity is such a closely guarded secret that even his wife is in the dark. But, with enemy agents on close his tail, his failure to trust her might be his undoing.

    The very first hero with a secret identity, the Scarlet Pimpernel is a worthy precursor to Zorro and Batman. His daring antics (and undeniable flair) are just as delightful today as they were a century ago.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateJan 11, 2018
    ISBN9781509858880
    Author

    Baroness Orczy

    Baroness Emmuska Orczy was born in Hungary in 1865. She lived in Budapest, Brussels, Paris, Monte Carlo, and London, where she died in 1947. The author of many novels, she is best known for The Scarlet Pimpernel.

    Read more from Baroness Orczy

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    Reviews for The Scarlet Pimpernel

    4/5

    1,930 ratings89 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A fun book. A combination of mystery, adventure, and romance. Some what predictable, but an enjoyable story in an interesting history of the French revolution.
    • 5/5
      This is quite possibly my favorite classic. I love books that take place during the French Revolution. The derivative works such as the musical and movies were good, but nothing beats the book.
    • 4/5
      I struggled whether to give this book, 3 1/2 or 4 stars, and in the end settled with 4. For being a romance novel, the Scarlet Pimpernel was a pretty good read. The character development was strong and the plot moved at a fairly quick pace. The only thing that would keep me from giving this book a perfect score is its predictability. Intensity had a hard time building up because of how obvious a coming plot turn was going to be.
    • 4/5
      Excellent book, if you like the films you will like this book
    • 2/5
      If you are older and like detailed books then this would be for you, I did not like this because I am a bad age to read it. This is a action/mystery/suspense book about a man who saves nobles from the french revolution's guillotene.
    • 3/5
      I had a vague idea that this book was a minor classic, an ignorant assumption based on a notion that any book written over 100 years ago and still in circulation is probably pretty good. I was wrong. The Scarlet Pimpernel is your typical cheesy romance. It's the same bad writing you can find in any bodice ripper only without the sex. At least it's short.
    • 3/5
      Justly famous for it's theatrical style, outrageous intrigue and less-than-2-percent-body-fat plot. I enjoyed it despite the florid writing and simplistic, one-sided view of historic events. Still, I must say, if the French secret police were really this dense, I too could have duped them as often and with equal panache.
    • 3/5
      pretty much told from the wife's point of view which is different to the films. not bad but not enough swashbuckling for me
    • 5/5
      I love this story first as a book, then in the many movie versions and also as a musical. While the Anthony Andrews is the version I love best, the old Leslie Howard version caught my heart and he actually kissed the ground she walked on and it did't look cheesy.
    • 3/5
      Great history, from both the classic sense of history and also in the sense of history of plotting in a mystery. The historical landscape is carefully described. It is also counterintuitive in terms of underdog/favorite dynamics. And the plotting itself is very clever, particularly so when you place it early on the development of mystery plotting. The chapters are short so it is also easy to pick up and set down.
    • 4/5
      The Scarlet Pimpernel is a very fast-paced adventure story, quick to read and with a finale as exciting as any Bruckheimer movie.
    • 4/5
      That was good fun.
    • 5/5
      I read this book when I was younger and just fell in love with it. The romanticism charmed me at the time, and I memorised the "They seek him here, they seek him there..." chant. A great book for anyone, especially me when I was growing up!
    • 5/5
      Hands down my all-time favourite book. I've always adored and identified with Marguerite, and I can't believe there's a female out there who wouldn't fall in love with Sir Percy. (Six foot odd of gorgeousness!). The ancestor of modern adventure stories -- truly a classic.
    • 5/5
      What a swashbuckling, great read. The story, set during the French Revolution, is full of daring, quick wittedness, and passion. Just plain fun!
    • 5/5
      This is an awesome book! It has a wonderful style mixed with mystery. Also, can be compared with the movie.
    • 5/5
      Oh what a lovely book. Don't let the historical setup fool you- it's basically a good old fashioned melodrama with a few thriller moments thrown in. I saw the old black-and-white movie a while ago, and while entertaining, it does not do justice to the story and the characters. It's truly a "big R" Romantic novel- larger than life heroes and villains, life-and-death choices, tragedy, humor and a few distinct love stories all blended together in a tightly written plot. Do yourself a favor- take a break from modern fast paced, world-weary fiction and spend some time with the characters and the world of Scarlet Pimpernel. You'd be surprised at how enjoyable the experience will be.
    • 5/5
      Though not very serious or dramatic, the silliness of this novel and its characters makes for a very entertaining read from cover to cover. Easy to read for people of all ages, this book is highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      One of the better romance/adventures. The book is more Marguerite's story than the Scarlet Pimpernel's, unlike every stage and screen adaptation (so far as I'm aware). It leans towards melodrama at moments- to be expected of a book that follows the Tale of Two Cities version of the French Revolution, with numbers of executions happening daily in 1792 which weren't reached except for the worst parts of 1794- but the original duel identity hero who has influenced everything from Zorro to Batman holds his own in the test of time.
    • 5/5
      WOW!! This book was amazing! A classic and a must read! I am not going to write a real review because it would be all spoilers anyway, so just know that you should read this! Some parts were hard from me to get through (lotttts of description!) but I am glad I kept at it, and in the end, this is now one of my favorite classics!
    • 4/5
      Because I originally read this in high school English class, I always had the idea that this book was considered capital-L Literature, but I've since realized that it's actually rather trashy. It goes down smooth--quick and very easy to read.

      This rereading left me with the idea of The Scarlet Pimpernel as the Twilight of its time, only with an adventure/historical fiction theme instead of fantasy. Between the melodrama and angst, the sweeping mysteries and secrets, the excessive physical descriptions, the sometimes lolarious writing...I'm sorry to say that I caught a resemblance.

      That said, I really like The Scarlet Pimpernel. The late-night scene between Percy and Marguerite after the Lord Grenville's ball is a favorite. I have a hard time picturing Marguerite as a blue-eyed strawberry blonde, despite what Orczy has to say about it.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the audio book, narrated by Mary Sarah. Audio books can be tricky, because loving it often depends on how good the narrator is. I thought that Mary Sarah was a great narrator and she added to the experience of the book.

      The Scarlet Pimpernel started off a little slowly to give readers an idea of setting and main characters. After these are established it's a page turner. I almost stopped the audio so that I could read the story myself, it pulled me in.

      As always, leaves me wanting more of the story, more of Marguerite and Percy and just more of this unassuming hero, using the prejudices of his society to save the innocent.
    • 3/5
      There's something about books you read when you're very young, the ones that transport you away. Even if they're embarrassing or not up to snuff when you re-read them later, they're still enjoyable due to the young feelings they re-kindle.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It really has to be read with fact that it was not written for our time. It is true to the writing style of the period, it has everything, romance, mystery, intrigue, double dealings. I think for its time, it was an amazing peice of fiction.
    • 5/5
      Lady Blakeney is a bit of a disappointment, considering she was written by a woman. However, the story being told through her point of view is a very interesting device. They are the proto-couple for Nick and Nora Charles (of the movies). Sir Percy himself is fantastic, and despite the slow-start to the book, the writing is exciting and story very captivating.
    • 4/5
      I read this as part of a monthly challenge in one of the groups I participate in. The parameters for the challenge being Classics, "read either a Shakespearean play or a classic love story." Amidst high school AP Lit flashbacks of the butcherings of Othello by the average drawling teen, I set out on the latter.

      'Odd's Fish!' I ended up really liking this quick read more than I thought I might. It's adventurous, fun, and it all ties up nicely in the end according to the majority of the wants and whims of the time's reading set.
    • 4/5
      I am a fan of the masked hero type. Zorro and Batman and the like. So you might want to take what I say with a grain of salt because I think I was predisposed to like this novel. And I did like it. There are less of the heroic adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel here than you may expect. You hear about his breathless, selfless rescues more than you actually get to see them. A lot of the book is told from the point of view of Lady Blakeney so the reader stays in England with her instead of getting to go to France with the Scarlet Pimpernel. But you still get to hear how he fools the French and does all sorts of heroic things. I think the events hold more surprises for the characters than they do for the reader but I don't think that hurts the story. Sometimes the 'I just want to be able to die beside my beloved' emotion of Lady Blakeney gets to be a bit much. And I have to admit that I was getting tired of being told that she was ever so clever, even though at times she didn't act like it. Over all I really liked it. It is fun and exciting with some suspense and romance.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful book. I wished it covered more of the Reign of Terror but it was a light-hearted read.
    • 4/5
      I LOVE this story!! I have read every version and adaptation, even the graphic novel!! I have also seen pretty much every version on film! The espionage, the duplicity, the tension, and drama are fantastic! Not to mention that the Scarlet Pimpernel is just the greatest pre-super hero, hero EVER!!!!
    • 3/5
      Yes, I realize this is a novel *against* the French Revolution (as my publisher so helpfully pointed out). Orczy's writing is gripping and the plot moves along quickly, reminding me of a reverse-Dickens novel.

    Book preview

    The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy

    Escape

    Introduction

    HILARY MANTEL

    When the Bastille was taken in July 1789, the Whig politician Charles James Fox exclaimed, ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the history of the world, and how much the best!’ The Times, on the other hand, forecast disaster: ‘Liberty, which has for some time past been the favourite hope of the French people, is a blessing of too solid a nature for the meagre understanding of that people [. . .] Licentiousness will beget anarchy’. A great debate had already begun, on the basis of insufficient information. History was being made at breakneck speed, too fast for analysis. Fictions flourished. In August, the proprietor of Astley’s Amphitheatre in London staged the Revolution as a giant pageant called PARIS IN AN UPROAR (nightly at half-past six). When rival shows opened, with even more brilliant special effects, Mr Astley placed an advertisement pointing out to the public that if they cared for accuracy they should stick to his show, for there had been positively no fireworks at the fall of the Bastille.

    The recasting of the Revolution into fiction began, then, scarcely a month after the first mass action. In England – and I mean England, not the British Isles – the fictional tradition has been a reactionary one. French Revolutionaries of all complexions have been vilified as crazed blood-drinkers, while a thousand bejewelled gallants and a thousand tear-streaked ladies with High Hair have had their way with our sympathies. It may be that the English misunderstand the Revolution on purpose. At the time of the Terror, they did not care to be reminded that it was they who had set the fashion for decapitating kings.

    George Orwell blamed Charles Dickens: as well he might. In A Tale of Two Cities, Orwell said,

    he gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke compared to one of Napoleon’s battles [. . .] To this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads.

    We have a problem with the scale. We have a problem with the chronology. Baroness Orczy, with her hugely popular Scarlet Pimpernel stories, made a heroic contribution to both problems. Who was she? Had she a Christian name, or did she always insist on ‘Baroness’?

    Her family called her Emmuska; she was born in 1865, on the Hungarian estate which had been in her family for generations. The Hungarian aristocracy then, she claimed, preserved itself in a feudal isolation from the modern world. Two ancient Transylvanian aunts, when travelling to Budapest, would refuse to take the eighteen-hour train journey and preferred to travel in a carriage-and-six, with postilions and relays. It took them five days. The approach to the twentieth century was reluctant indeed. When the first motor cars appeared in the cathedral square in which they lived, the aunts simply drew the blinds and shut them out.

    Emmuska grew up in a house with thirty-six guestrooms, and its own gymnasium and swimming baths. It was a house built for lavish hospitality: ‘early peaches and nectarines and pomegranates swimming in maraschino [. . .] And the gypsy band played unceasingly’. Her father, Felix, was not really a farmer. He was a musician and a friend of Liszt, who is said to have described him as the most talented amateur in Europe. Perhaps it was because his heart was not in estate management that one day his peasants revolted. They razed his steam-mill, an innovation they found worrying; and generally indulged in what the Press calls ‘an orgy of destruction’. The family left for Budapest, and never came back.

    In Budapest, Felix took up a court appointment in the National Theatre. He was a temperamental man, and there was a good deal of cliquish infighting. The family stayed for three years, then became peripatetic. Emmuska and her sister were deposited in a Brussels convent, where her sister died. There was a spell in a Paris convent; then, when Emmuska was fifteen, her parents decided to settle in London for a while. England at last – ‘my real, my spiritual birthplace’.

    Exactly why the Baroness felt her soul was English is difficult to work out from her autobiography, Links in The Chain of Life. She is also reticent about her long and seemingly happy marriage to Montagu Barstow, an artist and illustrator. But she is very clear about the moment her career as a writer began. An acquaintance ‘from the wilds of Derbyshire’, a young woman of a family ‘who know nothing of life, and never have spoken to anyone who might have taught them something’, succeeded in getting a short story accepted for publication. The Baroness swung into action.

    Here I am who have known so many brilliantly clever people, who have travelled and seen and appreciated so many marvels of this wide, wide world, who have studied art and music, history and drama, why shouldn’t I try to write something, I would like to know.

    Her first book sold only ninety copies, but she did not falter. She wrote detective stories, at £60 for six, but wanted to do ‘something big’. One of her early books brought in scores of letters from Scottish readers, who were angered by her careless description of their legal system. ‘I never again embarked on a statement of facts before feeling satisfied that I knew – yes, knew, what I was writing about.’ This is an astonishing claim. Can she have believed it? A little hitch about the duties of the procurator fiscal is as nothing compared to the knots she would tie herself into when she came to write about the French Revolution. To put it kindly: the Baroness’s fiction demonstrates the workings of the uninformed imagination. The Scarlet Pimpernel is a romantic adventure story; or a romance with swashbuckling interludes. One should not be too serious about it, perhaps, one should not take it to task for inaccuracy. And yet it surprises . . . It is, at some levels, a book less ignorable and more unpleasant than one had thought.

    Baroness Orczy first saw Sir Percy Blakeney – the Scarlet Pimpernel himself – on the London Underground, at Temple station. He was no flesh-and-blood Londoner, no lawyer or lawyer’s clerk; he was a construct of her strong visual sense, which she reckoned was all that remained of a disappointing early career as an artist. She could see, but not realize on canvas; she could realize on the page. Her hero stood before her, three-dimensional:

    I saw him in his exquisite clothes, his slender hands holding up his spy-glass: I heard his lazy drawling speech, his quaint laugh [. . .] it was the whole life-story of the Scarlet Pimpernel that was there and then revealed to me.

    She began writing next day, and five weeks later had completed the novel that would transform her life and make her fortune. Success was not instant, though. She tried to market Sir Percy’s deeds both as a book and a play. The play had its premiere at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham in 1903, and in a modified form enjoyed a run of two thousand London performances, adored by audiences and reviled by critics. The novel was turned down by twelve London publishers, and eventually published in 1905 by a small firm called Greening & Co., on the advice of an ancient lady living in Cornwall: she was the proprietor’s mother, employed by him (no doubt unpaid) as an arbiter of taste.

    Whatever the Baroness wrote afterwards, she would always be ‘author of The Scarlet Pimpernel’. Not that she tried too hard to evade Sir Percy. There were ten Scarlet Pimpernel novels, and two volumes of short stories. Alexander Korda’s film (1934) made her hero a household name. (Charles Laughton was the original choice for the part; after the news leaked, and ‘film fans’ protested, Leslie Howard was cast.) In 1932, she produced a novel called A Child of the Revolution, ‘one of the most interesting pieces of work I ever set myself to do’, which was an attempt to see those years from ‘the point of view of the many intellectuals who felt that nothing short of a complete overthrow of every one of her timeworn traditions would make France, great once more, able to take her place among the cultured and progressive nations of the world’. It would be interesting to know which intellectuals the Baroness studied, in her attempt at reversing her sympathies; Condorcet, one would think, rather than Dr Marat. She obviously didn’t convince herself of the merits of the revolutionary case, because soon it was business as usual with The Way of the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sir Percy Leads the Band.

    Emmuska’s Revolution, like that of Marie Antoinette, was a monolith. The unlucky queen could not distinguish between revolutionaries. They were all one to her, and all traitors: even those even-tempered gentlemen who only sought to limit her expenditure and bring in a mild copy of the English constitution. For Emmuska too, the Revolution was a matter of Aristocrats v. The Rest. The Scarlet Pimpernel opens in the month of September 1792, at a point where ‘during the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work’. A hundred heads had fallen that day, we are told, and a hundred would fall next day. Alas for the Baroness and her superheated sympathy: there were only seventy-two executions that month. To say this is not to exonerate, merely to state a fact.

    The monarchy had fallen in August. September saw one of the bloodiest episodes of the Revolution in Paris; some three thousand people died when mobs broke into the prisons and massacred the inhabitants, including many women and children. It was an atrocity which Baroness Orczy describes as the culmination of the ‘Reign of Terror’; in fact, it preceded it. The early pages of The Scarlet Pimpernel depict ‘A surging, seething, murmuring crowd, of beings that are human only in name [. . .] savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate’. The aristocrats are trying to flee Paris, to escape the teeth of these animals and ‘to evade the clutches of the Committee of Public Safety’ – not a matter of great difficulty, one would think, since at the date in question the Committee of Public Safety did not exist.

    Thirty minutes with a chronology of the Revolution, and Emmuska’s inner world might have melted away. Somehow, though, you doubt she’d have let facts get in the way of her engagement with Sir Percy Blakeney, the tall, handsome man about town who affects a foppish disregard of current affairs, whose limp epigrams amuse the Prince of Wales: Sir Percy, the richest man in England, and the laziest. Only his devoted band of nineteen followers know that he is in fact the man who – by way of almost superhuman cunning – whisks aristocrats from under the nose of the executioner. Even Sir Percy’s wife hasn’t fathomed his alias. Although she is described as ‘the cleverest woman in Europe’, she is remarkably slow on the uptake.

    Sir Percy’s bride is a French actress, Marguerite St Just. They are desperately in love with each other, but they have been driven apart by a misunderstanding about Margot’s past. She was a republican, and now regrets it; but did she denounce a noble family to revenge a personal slight? Margot has a brother back in Paris – another republican who is now repentant. The Pimpernel has to rescue him, along with the father of his wife’s old schoolfriend.

    It is time to stop and ask: why was Baroness Orczy so monstrously successful as an author? One can see some reasons. The plot of The Scarlet Pimpernel is weak; it depends on people who are said to be clever and quick-witted doing stupid things very slowly, and dropping messages saying, ‘I will be in the supper-room at one o’clock precisely’. And yet, the characters have the vast, crude, overwhelming emotions that are demanded by popular fiction. We do not have to get anxious about them because we know they are not real; they don’t wear clothes, but ‘the picturesque costume of the period’. (The Baroness, who wrote so vividly of her own early ballgowns, is unreliable about 1790s fashions.) The story trit-trots along, sometimes canters, sometimes gallops; and there is no unnecessary idealization of the young men who follow the Pimpernel. ‘Hair-breadth escapes . . . the devil’s own risks!—Tally-ho!—and away we go!’

    The source of her power does lie, as she herself believed, with the vivid, cinematographic quality of her writing. Imagine Marguerite in a box at the opera, attending to Glück while the evil Chauvelin hisses threats in her ear; Marguerite crouching in the loft of an inn near Calais, peeping from behind a ragged blue and white gingham curtain at the cutlery and napkin laid for the approaching Pimpernel; the schooner Day Dream lying at anchor under the moon, her sails white against a silver sea. The shots are perfectly framed for us, and it hardly matters that the pictures are cast into language which is ordinary in itself, though not ungraceful in rhythm. This writer is a dramatist by instinct, driving the story forward scene by scene, always striking an effective balance between dialogue and narrative.

    Then again, it is the power of the stereotype that pulls an audience in her wake. All authors who meet their public know that certain questions are asked again and again, and the Baroness’s favourite question was: ‘how comes it that you, a pure-blooded Hungarian [. . .] have such a wonderful understanding of the British character and have created such a perfect representation of an English gentleman?’ For Sir Percy embodies a dream of grace under pressure, of daring nonchalance, of stainless honour. He runs into danger for the love of the thing, not because he must. He tests himself to the limits, and passes every time.

    A more subtle, underground stereotyping might be traced when it comes to the Pimpernel’s arch-enemy, Chauvelin, described as ‘the accredited agent of the French government’. There was a real-life Chauvelin, a marquis who became Master of the King’s Wardrobe in 1789, when he was twenty-three years old. When the king’s wardrobe ceased to be of the slightest importance, Chauvelin served in the army, then went to London as ambassador in 1792; perhaps it was thought that the English would find his pedigree reassuring. His mission was to keep England neutral in the approaching hostilities. After the execution of King Louis – ‘Louis the Last’, as the Jacobins called him optimistically – Chauvelin was expelled from England. He was imprisoned under the Terror, and released after the fall of Robespierre.

    Baroness Orczy’s Chauvelin is a man in middle age, described as ‘foxy’, and ‘fox-like’: described as such, again and again, so that the reader begins to whimper and groan, ‘Vulpine, Baroness, give me vulpine!’ He is sneaky and low and packed with menace, sharp of feature and small of stature: one can’t help but wonder whether the Baroness was reproducing the popular idea of Robespierre, playing on the images that had been implanted so easily after the leader’s death. Did the nuns use him as an awful warning, did young Emmuska tremble when she imagined she heard the Incorruptible’s light tread? One virtue she does grant Chauvelin; he is sincere.

    There is another, nastier stereotyping which the modern reader may find it hard to forgive, and it would be hypocritical to write this introduction without drawing attention to it. Sir Percy is, of course, a master of disguise. The disguise in which his daring rescue is managed here is that of an elderly Jew of ‘peculiarly dirty and loathsome appearance [. . .] with the peculiar shuffling gait which has remained the characteristic of the Jew trader in continental Europe to this day’. (One could just about stomach the plot device, were it not for the Baroness’s own throwaway comments.) Baroness Orczy’s premise is that no Frenchman of that era (or her own) would willingly stand near a Jew, so the disguise is unlikely to be scrutinized too closely. Dirty, abject, cringing . . . the adjectives heap themselves up. No doubt she is right about the extent of prejudice in the ordinary Frenchman, though it is worth noting that all Jews on French soil were granted civil equality in 1791. The legislators were ahead of the populace, but they were marching them towards the side of the light. And no doubt she is right about the extent of prejudice in her own era; even the Baroness will have known about the Dreyfus case. But her approach is repellent; there is no other word. It is possible to take a robust attitude in these matters – if you are not Jewish – and to suggest that old writing must be seen in its context, that it is educational to hear the uncensored voice of an age. Each reader must make up his or her mind. I would argue against bowdlerization; I wouldn’t, either, give The Scarlet Pimpernel to a child.

    But who else is it fit for? A rattling yarn with romantic longueurs, a romance with fisticuffs, a hero handsome, rich and brave, a ‘childlike’ heroine of winsome appeal, a French baddy who inhales pepper which he believes is snuff . . . it’s not for grown-ups, not really. And yet the impulses behind it are carefully calculated, those of a real crowd-pleaser, a woman who knew her trade and learned it early. Like Sir Percy, the Baroness is ‘demned elusive’. One is condemned to track her through her whimsicalities, without knowing whether they are of the least importance.

    A case in point: why did she give Sir Percy’s wife the maiden name of St Just and a brother called Armand, a ‘moderate’ republican? Why choose a name so close to that of Antoine Saint-Just, the icy robespierriste who was so devoted to the mechanism of Terror, and who went to the guillotine with unflinching hauteur? What did Baroness Orczy know about the real Saint-Just, or think she knew? She often described the Revolution as run by ‘Utopians’, and Saint-Just was certainly one of those; despite his politics, she perhaps admired him more than the exhausted pragmatists in the airless back rooms, those contingency-battered souls who ground the Revolution forward from day to day. Perhaps she admired the manner of his death. Perhaps she had seen his portrait – Saint-Just was impeccably handsome. Perhaps she just liked the name, and thought the rest didn’t matter. It’s a mystery. So let the Baroness sign off:

    ‘Ah! Monsieur,’ sighed the Comtesse, ‘it all sounds like a romance, and I cannot understand it at all.’

    ‘Why should you try, madame?’

    1

    Paris: September, 1792

    A surging, seething, murmuring crowd, of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation’s glory and his own vanity.

    During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the barricades for the night.

    And so the crowd rushed away from the Place de la Grève and made for the various barricades in order to watch this interesting and amusing sight.

    It was to be seen every day, for those aristos were such fools! They were traitors to the people, of course, all of them, men, women, and children who happened to be descendants of the great men who since the Crusades had made the glory of France: her old noblesse. Their ancestors had oppressed the people, had crushed them under the scarlet heels of their dainty buckled shoes, and now the people had become the rulers of France and crushed their former masters—not beneath their heel, for they went shoeless mostly in these days—but beneath a more effectual weight, the knife of the guillotine.

    And daily, hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims—old men, young women, tiny children, even until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen.

    But this was as it should be: were not the people now the rulers of France? Every aristocrat was a traitor, as his ancestors had been before him: for two hundred years now the people had sweated, and toiled and starved, to keep a lustful court in lavish extravagance; now the descendants of those who had helped to make those courts brilliant had to hide for their lives—to fly, if they wished to avoid the tardy vengeance of the people.

    And they did try to hide, and tried to fly: that was just the fun of the whole thing. Every afternoon before the gates closed and the market carts went out in procession by the various barricades, some fool of an aristo endeavoured to evade the clutches of the Committee of Public Safety. In various disguises, under various pretexts, they tried to slip through the barriers which were so well guarded by citizen soldiers of the Republic. Men in women’s clothes, women in male attire, children disguised in beggars’ rags: there were some of all sorts: ci-devant counts, marquises, even dukes, who wanted to fly from France, reach England, or some other equally accursed country, and there try to rouse foreign feeling against the glorious Revolution, or to raise an army in order to liberate the wretched prisoners in the Temple, who had once called themselves sovereigns of France.

    But they were nearly always caught at the barricades. Sergeant Bibot especially at the West Gate had a wonderful nose for scenting an aristo in the most perfect disguise. Then, of course, the fun began. Bibot would look at his prey as a cat looks upon the mouse, play with him, sometimes for quite a quarter of an hour, pretend to be hoodwinked by the disguise, by the wigs and other bits of theatrical make-up which hid the identity of a ci-devant noble marquise or count.

    Oh! Bibot had a keen sense of humour, and it was well worth hanging round that West Barricade, in order to see him catch an aristo in the very act of trying to flee from the vengeance of the people.

    Sometimes Bibot would let his prey actually out by the gates, allowing him to think for the space of two minutes at least that he really had escaped out of Paris, and might even manage to reach the coast of England in safety: but Bibot would let the unfortunate wretch walk about ten mètres towards the open country, then he would send two men after him and bring him back stripped of his disguise.

    Oh! that was extremely funny, for as often as not the fugitive would prove to be a woman, some proud marchioness, who looked terribly comical when she found herself in Bibot’s clutches after all, and knew that a summary trial would await her the next day, and after that the fond embrace of Madame la Guillotine.

    No wonder that on this fine afternoon in September the crowd round Bibot’s gate was eager and excited. The lust of blood grows with its satisfaction, there is no satiety: the crowd had seen a hundred noble heads fall beneath the guillotine to-day, it wanted to make sure that it would see another hundred fall on the morrow.

    Bibot was sitting on an overturned and empty cask close by the gate of the barricade; a small detachment of citoyen soldiers were under his command. The work had been very hot lately. Those cursed aristos were becoming terrified and tried their hardest to slip out of Paris: men, women and children, whose ancestors, even in remote ages, had served those traitorous Bourbons, were all traitors themselves and right food for the guillotine. Every day Bibot had had the satisfaction of unmasking some fugitive royalists and sending them back to be tried by the Committee of Public Safety, presided over by that good patriot, Citoyen Foucquier-Tinville.

    Robespierre and Danton both had commended Bibot for his zeal, and Bibot was proud of the fact that he on his own initiative had sent at least fifty aristos to the guillotine.

    But to-day all the sergeants in command at the various barricades had had special orders. Recently a very great number of aristos had succeeded in escaping out of France and reaching England in safety. There were curious rumours about these escapes; they had become very frequent and singularly daring; the people’s minds were coming strangely excited about it all. Sergeant Grospierre had been sent to the guillotine for allowing a whole family of aristos to slip out of the North Gate under his very nose.

    It was asserted that these escapes were organized by a band of Englishmen, whose daring seemed to be unparalleled and who, from sheer desire to meddle in what did not concern them, spent their spare time in snatching away lawful victims destined for Madame la Guillotine. These rumours soon grew in extravagance; there was no doubt that this band of meddlesome Englishmen did exist; moreover, they seemed to be under the leadership of a man whose pluck and audacity were almost fabulous. Strange stories were afloat of how he and those aristos whom he rescued became suddenly invisible as they reached the barricades, and escaped out of the gates by sheer supernatural agency.

    No one had seen these mysterious Englishmen; as for their leader, he was never spoken of, save with a superstitious shudder. Citoyen Foucquier Tinville would in the course of the day receive a scrap of paper from some mysterious source; sometimes he would find it in the pocket of his coat, at others it would be handed to him by some one in the crowd, whilst he was on his way to the sitting of the Committee of Public Safety. The paper

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