The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel
Baroness Emma Orczy
Adventure/Historical Fiction
Published 1919
Synopsis
The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is a short-story collection focused on Sir Percy Blakeney’s League and their adventures in France during 1793, rescuing a diverse cast of innocents from revolutionary justice. Each tale stands displays the Pimpernel’s ingenuity, his network of devoted English allies, and the constant threat of discovery by revolutionary officials. The stories flesh out the League’s solidarity and the varied human consequences of revolution’s extremities. The Pimpernel himself remains a figure of almost mythic cleverness, his signature scarlet pimpernel flower a mark of hope and defiance. Loyalty among comrades and the perils of ideological zeal permeate these stories, underscoring the moral complexity of aiding the condemned in a period of political and social terror.
Novel Excerpt
Bibot was very sure of himself. There never was, never had been, there never would be again another such patriotic citizen of the Republic as was citizen Bibot of the Town Guard.
And because his patriotism was so well known among the members of the Committee of Public Safety, and his uncompromising hatred of the aristocrats so highly appreciated, citizen Bibot had been given the most important military post within the city of Paris.
He was in command of the Porte Montmartre, which goes to prove how highly he was esteemed, for, believe me, more treachery had been going on inside and out of the Porte Montmartre than in any other quarter of Paris. The last commandant there, citizen Ferney, was guillotined for having allowed a whole batch of aristocrats—traitors to the Republic, all of them—to slip through the Porte Montmartre and to find safety outside the walls of Paris. Ferney pleaded in his defence that these traitors had been spirited away from under his very nose by the devil’s agency, for surely that meddlesome Englishman who spent his time in rescuing aristocrats—traitors, all of them—from the clutches of Madame la Guillotine must be either the devil himself, or at any rate one of his most powerful agents.
“Nom de Dieu! just think of his name! The Scarlet Pimpernel they call him! No one knows him by any other name! and he is preternaturally tall and strong and superhumanly cunning! And the power which he has of being transmuted into various personalities—rendering himself quite unrecognisable to the eyes of the most sharp-seeing patriot of France, must of a surety be a gift of Satan!”
But the Committee of Public Safety refused to listen to Ferney’s explanations. The Scarlet Pimpernel was only an ordinary mortal—an exceedingly cunning and meddlesome personage it is true, and endowed with a superfluity of wealth which enabled him to break the thin crust of patriotism that overlay the natural cupidity of many Captains of the Town Guard—but still an ordinary man for all that! and no true lover of the Republic should allow either superstitious terror or greed to interfere with the discharge of his duties which at the Porte Montmartre consisted in detaining any and every person—aristocrat, foreigner, or otherwise traitor to the Republic—who could not give a satisfactory reason for desiring to leave Paris.