A Child of the Revolution
Baroness Emma Orczy
Adventure/Historical Fiction
Published 1932
Synopsis
A Child of the Revolution is set near the end of the French Revolution’s most radical phase, and uniquely shifts focus from the famed Sir Percy Blakeney to the story he recounts of André Vallon, a passionate young Jacobin whose desire for revenge against a despotic French Lord drives him to exploit the revolutionary uprising for personal ends. After forcing the Lord’s daughter into marriage, André’s motives evolve, with the couple eventually coming to love one another. Their domestic and ideological struggles illustrate the human cost of political upheaval as family bonds and personal honor collide with collective violence of French society at the time. Sir Percy relays this tale to the Prince of Wales, using it to reflect on the broader consequences of revolution’s excesses on individual lives.
Novel Excerpt
On this same afternoon when André Vallon, still rebellious in spirit, followed M. le Curé de Val-le-Roi up the wooded slopes that led to the château, the picture that was revealed to his gaze when he came in sight of the gorgeous old building, with its sumptuous gardens, its marble terraces, its towers and battlements, its stately trees and wealth of flowers, was one he never forgot. Vaguely he had heard the château spoken of by those who knew, as “magnificent”; vaguely he was aware that Monseigneur lived there in a state of splendour of which he, a village lad, had no conception, even in his dreams; and from the valley below, where on the outskirts of Val-le-Roi his mother’s cottage lay perdu, he had often gazed upwards to the heights, where at sunset the pointed roofs glistened like silver and the rows of windows sparkled like a chain of rubies; but he had never been allowed to wander up the slope and see all that magnificence at close quarters.
Heavy gilded iron gates shut off the precincts of the château from prying eyes and vagabond footsteps; stern janitors warned trespassers against daring to set foot inside the park; and thus the place where dwelt those unapproachable personages, Monseigneur and his friends, had hitherto appeared to André like fairyland, or rather, like the ogre’s castle of which he had read in the storybooks of M. Perrault—the ogre who devoured all the good things of this earth and always wanted more.
André was dazzled. The same enthusiasm that made him love the moonlight, the cottontails, or the hedgerows caused him to utter a cry of pleasure when he first caught sight of the château. He came to a halt and allowed his eyes to feast themselves on the picture. M. le Curé was delighted; he thought that the boy was showing a nice spirit of reverence and of awe.
“It is beautiful, is it not, André?” he remarked complacently.
But André’s mood was not quite as serene as the worthy priest had fondly hoped. He turned sharply on his heel and retorted with a scowl:
“Of course it is beautiful, but why should it be his?”
“What in the world do you mean?”
“You call that man up there ‘Monseigneur.’ Why? This all belongs to him. Why?”
“Because.”
The good Curé droned on. André certainly did not listen; he stalked on once more, irritable and silent. He had asked a question for which, in his own mind, there could not possibly be an answer. True that something of the bitterness of intense hatred had, as it were, flowed out of him with the tears which he had shed on his mother’s breast, but the spirit of inquiry, of blind groping after mysteries which were incapable of solution had, for good or ill, replaced the childish acceptance of things as they were. To him henceforth his mother’s penury and Monseigneur’s wealth were not preordained by God; they did not form a part of the scheme of creation as God had originally decreed. They were the result of man’s incapacity to grapple with injustice; the result, in fact, of the weakness of one section of humanity and of the arrogant strength of the other.