The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy, Folio Society, 1997 (4th pr., 2001)

Description: From an article on the life of Baroness Orczy (https://newcriterion.com/article/the-mystery-behind-the-baroness/), a nice summary of the plot (spoilers!): What first impressed me when, as a boy, I picked up a paperback of The Scarlet Pimpernel was its author’s name: Baroness Orczy. She didn’t write as Mrs. Montagu Barstow—her husband was a well-known magazine illustrator—or even as Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, which is what she was christened in Hungary. While her friends in London or Monte Carlo may have called her “Emmuska,” on the covers of her many books she was always Baroness Orczy. That name alone seems to promise glamour, romance, swashbuckling excitement. In photographs, however, she looks more like the family cook—well upholstered, benevolent—than one of the most remarkable authors of her time. Orczy, for instance, created one of the very first “armchair” detectives in The Old Man in the Corner (1909) and one of the earliest female policewomen in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910). In The Gates of Kamt (aka By the Gods Beloved, 1905) she made an outstanding contribution to that once-flourishing genre, the “lost world” romance. Her historical spy stories featuring a secret agent under Napoleon, collected as The Man in Grey (1918), remain immensely entertaining even now. When, with the help of her husband, she concocted the play based on The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), it broke box office records and was later adapted and re-adapted for the movies, some scripts drawing further plot elements from the dozen later novels and short-story collections about her hero and his league of extraordinary gentlemen. If no longer as well known as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, or Peter Pan, The Scarlet Pimpernel nonetheless established the template for the superhero with a secret identity. During the French Revolution, an unknown Englishman—a master of disguise who speaks perfect French—daringly rescues those unjustly condemned to the guillotine. He goes by the name of a little red flower, the scarlet pimpernel. There’s even a ditty, sung in England, about him: We seek him here, we seek him there, Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell? That demmed, elusive Pimpernel? The Terror’s ruthless agent Chauvelin resolves to discover the identity of this hated enemy and destroy him. But how? Having in his power the unfortunate Armand St. Just, Chauvelin enlists the unwilling aid of the man’s beautiful sister, Marguerite, who is now married to a wealthy fop, the rather slow-witted Sir Percy Blakeney. Sir Percy’s coats were the talk of the town, his inanities were quoted, his foolish laugh copied by the gilded youth at Almack’s or the Mall. Everyone knew that he was hopelessly stupid, but then that was scarcely to be wondered at, seeing that all the Blakeneys for generations had been notoriously dull, and that his mother had died an imbecile. Though handsome, Sir Percy was famous for “the lazy, bored look which was habitual to him.” Even the witty Marguerite has come to disdain her husband as a fool. Though he had once been passionately in love with her, something has recently gone wrong in their marriage. Poor Marguerite! Little wonder that at times her thoughts wander to the heroic Scarlet Pimpernel: “There was a man she might have loved, had he come her way, everything in him appealed to her romantic imagination, his personality, his strength, his bravery, the loyalty of those who served under him in the same noble cause, and above all, the anonymity which crowned him, as if with a halo of romantic glory.” By threatening the life of her brother, Chauvelin forces Marguerite to help trap this elusive enemy of the Revolution. Eventually, the French agent learns that the man behind the Pimpernel identity will attend Lord Grenville’s ball and at 1 am be in the supper-room. Chauvelin arrives there first: The supper-room was deserted: this would make Chauvelin’s task all the easier, when presently that unsuspecting enigma would enter it alone. No one was here now save Chauvelin himself. Stay! As he surveyed with a satisfied smile the solitude of the room, the cunning agent of the French Government became aware of the peaceful, monotonous breathing of some one of my Lord Grenville’s guests, who, no doubt, had supped both wisely and well, and was enjoying a quiet sleep, away from the din of the dancing above. Chauvelin looked round once more, and there in the corner of a sofa, in the dark angle of the room, his mouth open, his eyes shut, the sweet sounds of peaceful slumbers proceeding from his nostrils, reclined the gorgeously-apparelled, long-limbed husband of the cleverest woman in Europe. Chauvelin looked at him as he lay there, placid, unconscious, at peace with all the world and himself. . . . Evidently, the slumberer, deep in dreamless sleep, would not interefere with Chauvelin’s trap. But, oddly enough, The Scarlet Pimpernel never shows up. The fatuous Sir Percy just snores happily away on the sofa. There’s a memorable bit of writerly advice, sometimes attributed to Wilkie Collins but actually by Charles Reade (author of The Cloister and the Hearth, now half-forgotten but the favorite novel of Arthur Conan Doyle): “Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait.” Orczy’s novel does all those, but especially the last, as she slowly, methodically drops the clues that the reader, far sooner than her characters, puts together. Only half-way through the novel—with plenty of action still to come—does Marguerite start to wonder: “What connection could there be between her exquisite dandy of a husband, with his fine clothes and refined, lazy ways, and the daring plotter who rescued French victims from beneath the very eyes of the leaders of a bloodthirsty revolution?” Finally, the dark truth hits home: “In betraying a nameless stranger to his fate in order to save her brother, had Marguerite Blakeney sent her husband to his death?” While The Scarlet Pimpernel lives on as one of the world’s great adventure novels, it is also a wonderful and unusual story about love and married life. Not surprisingly, Orczy’s own marriage was one of cloudless happiness for half a century. As she says, with moving simplicity, near the end of her autobiography, Links in the Chain of Life: “Early in 1943 the light went out of my life. My darling passed away and I was left in darkness and alone.”... BCES2/0ds7

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