The Scarlet Pimpernel

THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL

Baroness Orczy

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook edition published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from

Collins English Dictionary

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Source ISBN: 9780008278762

Ebook Edition © 2018 ISBN: 9780008280192

Version: 2018-03-01

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of William Collins

Life & Times

Chapter I: Paris: September, 1792

Chapter II: Dover: “The Fisherman’s Rest”

Chapter III: The Refugees

Chapter IV: The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel

Chapter V: Marguerite

Chapter VI: An Exquisite Of ’92

Chapter VII: The Secret Orchard

Chapter VIII: The Accredited Agent

Chapter IX: The Outrage

Chapter X: In the Opera Box

Chapter XI: Lord Grenville’s Ball

Chapter XII: The Scrap of Paper

Chapter XIII: Either – Or?

Chapter XIV: One O’Clock Precisely!

Chapter XV: Doubt

Chapter XVI: Richmond

Chapter XVII: Farewell

Chapter XVIII: The Mysterious Device

Chapter XIX: The Scarlet Pimpernel

Chapter XX: The Friend

Chapter XXI: Suspense

Chapter XXII: Calais

Chapter XXIII: Hope

Chapter XXIV: The Death-Trap

Chapter XXV: The Eagle and the Fox

Chapter XXVI: The Jew

Chapter XXVII: On the Track

Chapter XXVIII: The Père Blanchard’s Hut

Chapter XXIX: Trapped

Chapter XXX: The Schooner

Chapter XXXI: The Escape

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

History of William Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books, and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William co-published in 1825, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed, and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time.

A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed, although the phrase wasn’t coined until 1907. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel, and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics, and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible, and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

The Scarlet Pimpernel, the enigmatic alter ego of upper-class fop Sir Percy Blakeney, is a hero who’s as English as can be: discreet, chivalrous and fiercely patriotic. ‘That was what I aimed at when I first conceived him,’ his creator explained in later life, ‘a perfect presentation of an English gentleman.’ It is all the more surprising, then, that his creator should be not only a woman but one born ‘of Hungarian parents and grand-parents and countless generations of Hungarians’, who, when she arrived in England aged fifteen, ‘did not speak one word of English’.

But Baroness Emma Orczy’s iconic character was not drawn solely from her adopted country. He emerged, very gradually, out of the extraordinary life she was dealt, as she saw it, by the will of God.

Early Years

Baroness Emma ‘Emmuska’ Orczy was born in Hungary in 1865, the second of two daughters of Baron Félix Orczy, a composer and amateur musician admired by the great Franz Liszt. In her 1947 memoir, Links in the Chain of Life, she notes that her noble Orczy ancestors are recorded as having arrived in Hungary ‘nearly two hundred years before the Norman Conquest’. Her mother’s side of the family was no less eminent, her grandfather being a count and member of the Hungarian parliament.

Her early childhood was one of privilege and great happiness; the family lived in a large house in the countryside, often filled with grand parties attended by distinguished acquaintances who were serenaded with lively gypsy music. But when she was just three years old, this idyllic country life came to an abrupt end: their farmland was torched during a violent peasant revolt against industrialisation, and the terror was enough to convince Baron Orczy to move his family to the safety of Budapest.

Emma, always an optimist, later came to see this dramatic flight from her childhood home as one of the best things that could have happened to her. It threw her father back into his musical career and the whole family into the glittering world of Budapest society. From there they moved through the capitals of Europe: Brussels, Paris and finally London, where they planned to stay only temporarily. For Emma Orczy, however, after fifteen years on the move, the city quickly came to be a permanent home.

The Search for Inspiration

The only career open to Orczy, as a nineteenth-century baroness whose father had traditional views of a woman’s place, was one in the arts – but even she knew that she had ‘absolutely no talent’ for music. After ‘dear old Liszt’ winced as he heard her attempt his own piano compositions, it was clear to Orczy that she would need to find her calling elsewhere. In London she enrolled at the West London School of Art and then the Heatherley School of Fine Art, and although some of her pieces were exhibited at the Royal Academy, she once again found that mediocrity stalked her through the art world – ‘mediocrity, again, my bugbear, my nightmare!’

But it was at Heatherley’s that she met illustrator Montagu Barstow, ‘the man who from that day became and remained all the world to me’. They married in 1894 and in 1899 had their only child, John Montague Orczy-Barstow. They were a blissfully happy family but money was tight, and finally Orczy had a light-bulb moment: she had seen so much of the world, and met so many fascinating people – why not put that life experience to profitable use by writing stories?

Buoyed by having two of her early stories accepted for publication in literary magazines, Orczy turned her attention to coming up with ‘something big. Something that would spread my name throughout the country, that would make it known and repeated by people who read, people who mattered, people whose opinion I would value.’ On an 1899 visit to Paris with Montagu, she found the French consumed by a fervent anti-English sentiment inspired by the horrors of the Boer War. At the same time the city echoed with tragic tales of noble Parisians who had fallen victim to the Reign of Terror a century earlier. The two threads converged in her mind to form the backdrop to a story; now all she needed was a hero.

He came to her, somewhat implausibly, on the platform of Temple Underground station in London. Standing there on a cold, foggy day, she suddenly had a mental vision before her of Sir Percy Blakeney: ‘I saw him in his exquisite clothes, his slender hands holding up his spy-glass: I heard his lazy drawling speech, his quaint laugh.’ The whole story fell into place, and within just five weeks in early 1903, Emma Orczy had written The Scarlet Pimpernel.

‘Such Happy Fools’

The Scarlet Pimpernel was not immediately accepted for publication as a novel, so Orczy adapted it into a play, which premiered rather quietly in Nottingham in 1903. In January 1905, however, with the addition of a new act co-written with Montagu, it opened at London’s New Theatre (now the Noël Coward), where it went on to have over two thousand performances. That same year, the novel was published.

Orczy was almost forty years old by now, but it was her first taste of the limelight and she was delighted. In her memoir she recalls sitting in an Oxford Street tea shop with Montagu and seeing a bus emblazoned with an advertisement for the play; it was going in the wrong direction but nonetheless they jumped aboard ‘and sat happily enthroned behind the magic placard all the way to Tottenham Court Road. ‘Weren’t we fools? But oh, such happy fools.’

The Scarlet Pimpernel

Set in 1792 at the height of the Reign of Terror, The Scarlet Pimpernel tells of a mysterious, swashbuckling English agent who rescues French royalists and aristocrats from execution and spirits them away to the safety of England. The only trace of his identity is a bragging note to the Public Prosecutor in Paris bearing a drawing of ‘a little English wayside flower’ – the scarlet pimpernel. All of London rings with a verse poking fun at the humiliation of the French authorities:

We seek him here, we seek him there,

Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.

Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?

That damned, elusive Pimpernel.

While the novel delights in ribbing England’s age-old rivals, the French, its casually anti-Semitic presentation of certain Jewish characters, whether or not ‘of its era’, makes for decidedly uneasy reading. The novel’s positive legacy is that it popularised the notion of a disguised hero with a signature weapon and an iconic calling card, aspects of which were later borrowed for the Lone Ranger (who first appeared in 1933), Superman (1938), Batman (1939) and perhaps most memorably Johnston McCulley’s character Zorro (1919). The Pimpernel made Baroness Emma Orczy a literary star and she capitalised on his success, writing a series of prequels and sequels to the original tale. He has appeared on stage and screen countless times, thoroughly refuting the Daily Mail critic who wrote, in 1905, that ‘the Scarlet Pimpernel is a little flower that blossoms and dies in one day, which is the obvious fate of this play’.

Montagu Barstow died in 1942 at the couple’s Monte Carlo villa. Baroness Emma Orczy died in London in 1947.

CHAPTER I

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 Greve 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 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 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 feelings 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 metres 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 was 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 in reaching England safely. There were curious rumours about these escapes; they had become very frequent and singularly daring; the people’s minds were becoming 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 organised 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 someone in the crowd, whilst he was on his way to the sitting of the Committee of Public Safety. The paper always contained a brief notice that the band of meddlesome Englishmen were at work, and it was always signed with a device drawn in red – a little star-shaped flower, which we in England call the Scarlet Pimpernel. Within a few hours of the receipt of this impudent notice, the citoyens of the Committee of Public Safety would hear that so many royalists and aristocrats had succeeded in reaching the coast, and were on their way to England and safety.

The guards at the gates had been doubled, the sergeants in command had been threatened with death, whilst liberal rewards were offered for the capture of these daring and impudent Englishmen. There was a sum of five thousand francs promised to the man who laid hands on the mysterious and elusive Scarlet Pimpernel.

Everyone felt that Bibot would be that man, and Bibot allowed that belief to take firm root in everybody’s mind; and so, day after day, people came to watch him at the West Gate, so as to be present when he laid hands on any fugitive aristo who perhaps might be accompanied by that mysterious Englishman.

“Bah!” he said to his trusted corporal, “Citoyen Grospierre was a fool! Had it been me now, at that North Gate last week …”

Citoyen Bibot spat on the ground to express his contempt for his comrade’s stupidity.

“How did it happen, citoyen?” asked the corporal.

“Grospierre was at the gate, keeping good watch,” began Bibot, pompously, as the crowd closed in round him, listening eagerly to his narrative. “We’ve all heard of this meddlesome Englishman, this accursed Scarlet Pimpernel. He won’t get through my gate, morbleu! unless he be the devil himself. But Grospierre was a fool. The market carts were going through the gates; there was one laden with casks, and driven by an old man, with a boy beside him. Grospierre was a bit drunk, but he thought himself very clever; he looked into the casks – most of them, at least – and saw they were empty, and let the cart go through.”

A murmur of wrath and contempt went round the group of ill-clad wretches, who crowded round Citoyen Bibot.

“Half an hour later,” continued the sergeant, “up comes a captain of the guard with a squad of some dozen soldiers with him. ‘Has a cart gone through?’ he asks of Grospierre, breathlessly. ‘Yes,’ says Grospierre, ‘not half an hour ago.’ ‘And you have let them escape,’ shouts the captain furiously. ‘You’ll go to the guillotine for this, citoyen sergeant! that cart held concealed the ci-devant Duc de Chalis and all his family!’ ‘What!’ thunders Grospierre, aghast. ‘Aye! and the driver was none other than that cursed Englishman, the Scarlet Pimpernel.’”

A howl of execration greeted this tale. Citoyen Grospierre had paid for his blunder on the guillotine, but what a fool! oh! what a fool!

Bibot was laughing so much at his own tale that it was some time before he could continue.

“‘After them, my men,’ shouts the captain,” he said after a while, “‘remember the reward; after them, they cannot have gone far!’ And with that he rushes through the gate followed by his dozen soldiers.”

“But it was too late!” shouted the crowd, excitedly.

“They never got them!”