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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Emma Orczy's novel, 'Sir Percy Hits Back', is a thrilling continuation of the beloved Scarlet Pimpernel series. Set in the midst of the French Revolution, the novel weaves together elements of romance, espionage, and adventure, all while maintaining a suspenseful tone. Orczy's meticulous attention to historical detail and clever use of plot twists keep readers engrossed from beginning to end. With her elegant prose and vivid descriptions, Orczy captures the ambiance of revolutionary France with a unique flair that sets her apart from other authors of her time. Emma Orczy, a notable playwright and novelist, drew inspiration for her work from her own experiences as a Hungarian immigrant living in England during a tumultuous period in European history. Her deep understanding of political intrigue and societal upheaval is evident in the intricate storyline of 'Sir Percy Hits Back', making it a compelling and thought-provoking read for history enthusiasts and fiction lovers alike. I highly recommend 'Sir Percy Hits Back' to readers who enjoy historical fiction with a touch of romance and suspense. Emma Orczy's masterful storytelling and complex characters will transport you to a world of daring escapades and unexpected betrayals, making this novel a must-read for fans of the Scarlet Pimpernel series. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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SIR PERCY HITS BACK
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Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world where tribunals call fear a virtue and the crowd’s shout drowns out conscience, one laughing gentleman turns mercy into strategy, dons masks as readily as others draw swords, crosses the Channel like a tightrope between life and death, and answers the mechanized ferocity of revolution with the intricate audacity of a rescuer who understands that to outwit a system you must look harmless while plotting boldly, to oppose terror you must choose your moment with theatrical precision, and to defend the innocent you must become, at once, a whisper in the alley and a storm upon the horizon.
Sir Percy Hits Back, by Baroness Emma Orczy, is a later installment in the celebrated Scarlet Pimpernel series, first published in 1927. Orczy—Hungarian-born and long resident in Britain—had already established Sir Percy Blakeney as the quintessential masked benefactor in her 1905 novel, itself based on her 1903 hit play. This volume returns to France during the revolutionary upheavals, where makeshift justice and bureaucratic ruthlessness endanger ordinary people. Without retreading earlier triumphs, it highlights a renewed confrontation between individual conscience and institutional power, staging high adventure under the shadow of the guillotine and the committees that fed it.
The novel’s premise is immediately compelling and admirably clear: provincial lives are ensnared by accusations and reprisals, and the machinery of terror moves with a momentum that seems unstoppable; then the Scarlet Pimpernel intervenes. Working across borders and behind personas, he orchestrates a counterplay that seeks not publicity but lifesaving precision. The tension derives less from battlefield clashes than from timing, disguise, and moral nerve. Readers are invited to watch how a fragile chain of decency can hold against official suspicion, and how courage, when properly masked, can thread its way through patrols, dossiers, and locked doors without announcing itself.
Its classic status rests first on craft. Orczy’s chapters move with theatrical clarity—curtains rising on peril, brief reprieves, new complications, and carefully sprung revelations—while the prose remains lucid and brisk. She marries romantic idealism to procedural ingenuity: the thrill lies as much in preparation as in performance. Across the pages, the high color of melodrama is disciplined by logistical detail, creating a narrative that respects both the heartbeat and the stopwatch. The result is a work that rewards re-reading: the pattern of feints and counters acquires elegance, and the theme of mercy-as-tactic shows its many facets.
The book’s importance also flows from a wider legacy. The Scarlet Pimpernel cycle helped establish the durable archetype of the dual-identity hero: socially unthreatening in daylight, strategically formidable in secret. This template has shaped adventure fiction, espionage tales, and later masked-hero narratives across media. Codes, ciphers, and a league of trusted allies model the infrastructure of clandestine resistance, while the interplay between public performance and private mission points forward to modern explorations of surveillance, cover stories, and persona. Sir Percy Hits Back demonstrates the staying power of that design, refining it with late-series confidence rather than merely repeating past maneuvers.
Its publication in the late 1920s situates it in the interwar period, decades after the character’s debut. That context matters: Orczy was not chasing a trend but returning to a creation that had already proven itself on page and stage. The novel looks back to the late eighteenth century yet speaks in a voice honed by early twentieth-century popular storytelling. Readers encounter a historically set adventure written with the assurance of a mature practitioner, one who understands how to balance historical texture with narrative economy, and how to keep moral stakes vivid without tethering the story to any single moment of contemporary politics.
Enduring themes anchor the book’s appeal. Justice versus vengeance, law versus conscience, and crowd will versus individual responsibility are never abstract arguments here; they are choices forced by midnight knocks and sealed orders. Identity itself becomes a moral instrument: the face one wears can protect a life or destroy it. Orczy insists that nobility is measured by conduct, not mere birth, even as she relishes the pageantry of rank and ceremony. The heroine and bystanders, officials and informers, all move within a moral weather that shifts rapidly, asking readers to weigh boldness against prudence and mercy against fear.
Orczy’s technique relies on misdirection made fair by preparation. Seemingly idle gestures acquire meaning once the stakes are clear; comic turns conceal reconnaissance; and moments of apparent retreat seed the conditions for victory. Disguises are not only costumes but arguments, persuading enemies to reveal themselves or to underestimate a threat. Scenes flow between streets, taverns, safe houses, and austere chambers, each precisely furnished to heighten pressure. The author’s stage background shows in her command of entrances and exits, overheard conversations, and focal props that carry narrative charge. The resulting choreography lets wit win skirmishes that force could not.
As in the wider series, character is plot. Sir Percy’s paradox—a foppish exterior masking strategic brilliance—creates an ever-renewable source of suspense: who, in any given scene, is seeing through the act, and who is beguiled by it? His network, the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, exemplifies disciplined friendship as a counter to state power, while opponents embody the zeal and suspicion of revolutionary administration. Orczy affords space to ordinary citizens caught between decrees and survival, grounding the romance of rescue in the real costs borne by families, neighbors, and small communities under scrutiny.
Style reinforces substance. Orczy writes with clarity that favors momentum but allows for gleams of irony, letting laughter sit beside dread without dissolving it. The narrative enjoys ceremony—the rustle of papers, the creak of doors, the ritual of official announcements—yet uses that ceremony to expose the human frailty within systems. Sentiment is present but rarely indulgent; courage is admirably quiet; cruelty is shown through procedure as much as through threats. The balance prevents the story from tipping into either cold mechanism or overheated spectacle, maintaining poise even as peril tightens around the vulnerable.
The novel’s classic standing endures because the Scarlet Pimpernel remains culturally alive. The character has crossed formats—stage, page, and screen—becoming a shorthand for daring rescue and playful disguise. New generations meet him in reprints and adaptations, then return to the books for the intricacy that popular memory often streamlines. Sir Percy Hits Back benefits from that recognition while justifying it on its own terms: it delivers a self-contained crisis, a pattern of ingenuity and mercy, and a reaffirmation of why the persona matters—not as a mask for vanity, but as a tool of protection and hope.
For contemporary readers, the book feels timely without forcing analogies. It asks how individuals can shield the innocent when procedures go wrong, how public narratives can be manipulated, and how imagination can resist coercion. It offers no manual for modern crises, but it supplies a durable grammar of courage: notice everything, assume less than you appear to, and let mercy guide boldness rather than temper it. That ethic, framed in suspenseful storytelling, explains the lasting appeal of Sir Percy Hits Back and the classic status of the series that shelters it. We read for delight—and we stay for conscience.
Synopsis
Sir Percy Hits Back, by Emma Orczy, returns to the world of the Scarlet Pimpernel during the upheavals of the French Revolution. As an installment in the long-running series, it blends cloak‑and‑dagger stratagems with moral inquiry, casting Sir Percy Blakeney against his implacable adversary, Citizen Chauvelin. The novel situates its drama in a climate of political suspicion and punitive justice, where tribunals and informers shape daily life. Orczy builds a narrative that is both adventure and character study, foregrounding the dilemmas that ideological zeal creates. Without abandoning the series’ hallmark wit and daring rescues, the book emphasizes emotional stakes and the human costs of revolutionary fervor.
The story opens in a provincial district where the machinery of the Committee of Public Safety grinds relentlessly. Local officials rely on denunciations to prove zeal, while citizens navigate shifting loyalties and dangers. A household at the edge of this tense society becomes the focus of gossip and hostility, and petty resentments quickly take on political meaning. Orczy paints the pressures of communal fear: neighbors whisper, emissaries from Paris make examples, and a single accusation can spiral into a formal charge. The atmosphere is volatile yet intimate, allowing personal grudges to fuse with ideological fervor in ways that feel both capricious and inevitable.
Amid this fraught landscape, a young woman—innocent, sheltered, and beloved—finds herself imperiled by rumors that attach treasonous significance to trivial acts. Her vulnerability is compounded by her connection to Chauvelin, whose public role demands severity even when private feeling might counsel mercy. Opportunists exploit the situation, transforming envy and spite into legal peril. Orczy steadily tightens the net: a careless remark becomes evidence, a gesture becomes suspicion, and the machinery of accusation sets to work. The case becomes a test not only of political orthodoxy but of the revolution’s claim to justice, with the stakes rising far beyond one person’s safety.
News of the danger reaches the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and Sir Percy takes an interest shaped by principle as much as strategy. He is drawn to any instance where innocence is threatened by show trials and unchecked power. Orczy underscores his dual nature: the foppish mask that disarms adversaries and the cool tactician who orchestrates complex rescues. Rather than a straightforward extraction, the situation demands finesse, patience, and an ability to read motives on all sides. Percy studies the local hierarchy, identifies weak points in communication and command, and begins laying quiet groundwork while remaining hidden in plain sight.
Chauvelin, ever calculating, recognizes an opportunity to strike at his old enemy. By turning the threatened case into bait, he constructs a trap that promises both political capital and personal vindication. He fortifies roads, augments patrols, and seeds misinformation to flush out any clandestine intervention. The tribunal’s schedule and the timing of escorts are arranged with precision. Orczy depicts a contest of minds: letters are intercepted, identities blurred, and both sides trade moves without revealing their full designs. The town itself becomes a chessboard on which reputation, fear, and surveillance are pieces to be maneuvered.
Sir Percy answers with misdirection and audacity. He adopts disguises suitable to the district’s rhythms, insinuates himself among petty officials, and sows small confusions that exact a cumulative toll. Orders are duplicated, seals appear where they should not, and key actors find their certainty subtly undermined. Members of the League assist in quiet tasks—conveying messages, securing transport, and mapping safe passages—while Percy preserves flexibility, ready to pivot as Chauvelin adjusts. Orczy keeps the pace measured yet taut, emphasizing the incremental work of subterfuge as much as the flourishes for which the Pimpernel is renowned, including the appearance of his unmistakable emblem.
At the heart of the novel lies a moral struggle that complicates the familiar rivalry. Chauvelin is forced to balance ideological rigor against a deeply personal attachment, while the young woman’s predicament exposes the human cost of political absolutism. Private conversations suggest a man who knows the reach of the state he serves, even as he relies on it. Percy, for his part, confronts the paradox of extending chivalry to his enemy’s circle without eroding his resolve. Orczy refrains from caricature, allowing fear, pride, and tenderness to jostle within the same characters, and letting their choices carry genuine emotional weight.
The action crescendos as tribunal proceedings near and security measures tighten. Orczy stages overlapping gambits: decoys appear, messages are passed under watchful eyes, and timing becomes everything. A nighttime maneuver tests nerve and resourcefulness, while a daylight confrontation threatens to unmask carefully guarded roles. The possibility of betrayal hovers in the background, and minor figures—clerks, guards, townsfolk—unexpectedly influence larger events. The narrative remains focused on immediate jeopardy and moral urgency, but withholds final outcomes, sustaining the question of whether courage and cunning can prevail against an apparatus designed to crush both.
Taken together, Sir Percy Hits Back affirms the series’ enduring concerns: that mercy can challenge terror, that wit and imagination are forms of resistance, and that personal loyalty complicates political dogma. Orczy uses the case at hand to explore how justice falters when fear governs institutions, while also reminding readers why the Scarlet Pimpernel mythos has lasted—its blend of romance, suspense, and ethical inquiry. Without disclosing the ultimate resolution, the novel’s lasting significance lies in its insistence that humane impulses survive even under extremity, and that steadfastness in small acts can counter the loud machinery of oppression.
Historical Context
Sir Percy Hits Back unfolds against the convulsions of the French Revolution, chiefly the early 1790s, when France was governed first by the National Convention (1792–1795) and, at the height of crisis, dominated by the Committee of Public Safety (1793–1794) and the Committee of General Security. Revolutionary tribunals and local surveillance committees reached into towns and villages, while new civic rituals and laws reshaped daily life. Across the Channel, Britain remained a constitutional monarchy under George III and the ministry of William Pitt the Younger. War between France and Britain beginning in 1793 made clandestine movement perilous, yet possible, furnishing the novel’s world of perilous crossings and contested authority.
The fall of the French monarchy in August 1792 and the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 inaugurated a period of political emergency. The Reign of Terror—roughly autumn 1793 to July 1794—combined fear of internal conspiracy with external war. Revolutionary rhetoric invoked virtue and vigilance; policy translated those ideals into surveillance, tribunals, and exemplary punishment. The book’s atmosphere of suspicion, nocturnal arrests, and precarious legality echoes this climate without requiring detailed institutional exposition to be understood. Readers encounter a landscape where allegiance can be questioned at any moment and where a wrong word or a forged paper may mean the difference between safety and the scaffold.
Central to that climate was the Law of Suspects (September 1793), which authorized detentions of those deemed “suspect” by local committees—nobles, officials, “bad citizens,” or anyone lacking a certificate of civic virtue. Municipal committees, “sections” in Paris, and revolutionary commissioners compiled lists, demanded identity papers, and relied on denunciations. Certificates of civism and passports became essential for travel and even for passing between neighborhoods. Sir Percy Hits Back draws on this reality of local power and bureaucratic zeal: petty officials wield extraordinary leverage, informers can make or break lives, and the machinery of suspicion reaches beyond Paris into provincial towns where private grudges and public ideology intertwine.
Justice during the Terror was concentrated in the Revolutionary Tribunal, established in March 1793 and accelerated by legislation in mid-1794. The guillotine—adopted for its supposed efficiency and equality—became the stark emblem of state punishment. The Law of 22 Prairial, Year II (June 1794) curtailed defense rights and widened definitions of political crime, producing rapid trials and a spike in executions in the so‑called Great Terror. The novel’s threatened executions and frantic rescues reflect the pace and performative quality of revolutionary justice, in which spectacle and speed were meant to terrify enemies and to reassure ardent citizens that vigilance reigned.
Economic breakdown sharpened politics. Assignats—paper money issued from late 1789 on the security of nationalized church lands—depreciated rapidly by 1793–1794. Bread scarcity, inflation, and fears of hoarding drove the sans-culottes to demand coercive measures. The Law of the Maximum (September 1793) imposed price controls and requisitions; revolutionary “armies” enforced them in markets and granaries. Crowds could be political actors, pushing authorities toward harsher policies. In this climate, characters’ choices about food, money, and movement carry existential stakes. The book’s tense streets, guarded bakeries, and sudden eruptions of popular anger have a factual counterpart in the urban economy and policing of necessities.
Religious and cultural transformation also framed daily life. Dechristianization surged in 1793–1794: churches closed, clergy were pressured to marry or recant, and local festivals replaced traditional rites. The Revolutionary Calendar, adopted in late 1793, reorganized time into ten-day weeks and renamed months, while “citizen” replaced aristocratic forms of address. Some regions complied; others resisted quietly or violently. Provincial France, with its entrenched practices, often met Jacobin cultural change with evasion or sympathy for clergy and nobles. The novel’s provincial settings, where old loyalties survive beneath revolutionary slogans, echo well-documented tensions between centralizing policies and local religious and social rhythms.
Counterrevolutionary conflict was fiercest in the Vendée and in Brittany, where peasant, clerical, and royalist forces rose from 1793 and fought irregular warfare until roughly 1796, with flare‑ups later. Republican repression, including the “infernal columns” in 1794, left devastated communities and a legacy of grievance. British aid to western insurgents existed but was constrained by strategy and sea conditions. Although the Scarlet Pimpernel tales often pivot around Parisian tribunals, their excursions into the provinces resonate with this fractured landscape: divided villages, ambush-prone roads, and the constant hazard that a friendly farmhouse might shelter a proscribed priest—or a government spy.
The émigré phenomenon supplies another essential context. From 1789 onward, thousands of nobles, officers, and clergy fled, forming communities in Britain, the German states, and beyond. Britain admitted many, especially after 1792, and charitable committees in London raised relief funds by 1793. Émigrés organized regiments abroad and nurtured hopes of restoration, while those remaining in France risked prison and confiscation. Histories and memoirs recount escapes by disguise, forged papers, and night crossings. The Scarlet Pimpernel myth dramatizes these routes and perils; the rescues imagined in the series mirror real patterns of flight, surveillance, and the perilous ambiguity of borders during wartime.
International war shaped every decision. The War of the First Coalition (1793–1797) pitted revolutionary France against Britain and several European powers. The Royal Navy’s growing blockade constrained French ports; operations along the Channel, including around Dunkirk and Calais, heightened risk for smugglers and fugitives. In Britain, the Aliens Act (1793) required foreign arrivals to register and carry papers, balancing asylum with surveillance. The novel’s clandestine crossings, hidden cargoes, and sudden interrogations reflect a space militarized by patrols and bureaucratic controls, where coastal villages profit from secrecy yet live under watchtowers, signal stations, and the ceaseless traffic of war.
Communications technology also tightened the net. France’s Chappe optical telegraph began operating between Paris and Lille in 1794 and soon extended, enabling rapid transmission of official messages and warrants. Travel nevertheless remained dependent on horses, post-chaises, mail coaches, and coastal craft vulnerable to weather and patrols. Internal movement typically required passports and attestations from local authorities during 1792–1794. In Britain, coastal signal systems developed in the mid‑1790s to report enemy sails. The novel leverages these constraints: news can outrun horsemen along telegraph lines, while forged papers and timing must outwit both the weather and the state’s improving means of command.
Revolutionary policing mixed ideology with informality. The Committee of General Security oversaw internal security, coordinating with local surveillance committees and the National Convention. Representatives-on-mission carried broad powers into the provinces. Espionage, counterespionage, and propaganda flourished on both sides of the Channel. Britain covertly subsidized royalist plots and intelligence networks on the continent in the mid‑1790s; figures such as William Wickham became prominent in these efforts. While the Scarlet Pimpernel is fictional, his operations parallel the era’s clandestine exchanges of funds, couriers, codes, and clandestine landings that linked émigrés, smugglers, and sympathetic officials.
Beneath the violence lay deep social change. The night of 4 August 1789 abolished feudal dues and seigneurial privileges; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen framed a new legal order. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) restructured the church, splitting communities between “constitutional” and “refractory” clergy. Confiscation of émigré and church property redistributed wealth, but also bred resentment and opportunities for enrichment. The novel’s sympathy for persecuted aristocrats reflects one side of this upheaval; nonetheless, the shifting legal definitions of citizenship, property, and loyalty shaped everyone’s vulnerability, from servants and traders to former lords and local officials.
Women’s political presence surged and was then constrained. Women petitioned and organized; the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women formed in spring 1793 before women’s clubs were banned later that year. Public figures such as Olympe de Gouges, who authored the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, were executed in 1793. The image of tricoteuses at executions became a powerful, if often caricatured, symbol of popular militancy. Legal inequalities persisted despite revolutionary rhetoric. The series’ recurrent perils faced by women—arrest as suspects, dependency on papers held by male guardians, or exposure to street violence—conform to the documented vulnerabilities of the period’s judicial and social order.
Britain’s domestic climate conditioned cross-Channel encounters. The government prosecuted radicals and suspended habeas corpus in 1794; after unrest in 1795, it passed the Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings Acts. The press debated Jacobinism and loyalty, with caricatures and sermons warning of continental excess. Meanwhile, émigré communities formed in London districts such as Soho and Marylebone, sustaining French parishes, schools, and relief societies from 1793 onward. Coastal Kent and Sussex, long familiar with smuggling, offered pathways for clandestine movement under the watch of customs men and naval patrols. The Scarlet Pimpernel’s English havens and covert networks fit this social and legal environment.
Baroness Emma Orczy, the Anglo-Hungarian author, was born in 1865 and settled in Britain as a young woman. She achieved fame with The Scarlet Pimpernel stage play (1903) and novel (1905), then expanded the cycle in subsequent decades. Sir Percy Hits Back belongs to these interrelated adventures and was first published in the 1920s. Orczy’s aristocratic background and taste for melodrama inclined her toward narratives that vindicate chivalry and hierarchy against revolutionary excess. She drew on widely available histories, memoirs, and popular images of the Terror to furnish recognizable institutions—tribunals, committees, guillotines—while shaping them to the requirements of suspense and rescue fiction.
The interwar years supplied their own pressures. After 1917, revolutions and civil wars—most notably in Russia, and briefly in Hungary in 1919—stoked European fears of mass violence and ideological extremism. In Britain, 1919–1920 saw labor unrest and an anticommunist “Red Scare.” Readers and publishers gravitated toward stories that championed order, patriotism, and individual gallantry. A Scarlet Pimpernel novel appearing in the 1920s inevitably spoke to these anxieties, using the Terror as a historical analogue for modern fears about mob rule, political purges, and revolutionary tribunals. Its villains and perils resonated with contemporary debates over security, liberty, and the moral costs of emergency powers.
The book’s material world rests on verifiable textures: the circulation of assignats; the hunger for official stamps and signatures; the constant need to calculate time in a calendar that changed month names; and the reliance on horses and tides rather than telephones or railways. Such details ground the romance in plausible constraints. Even disguises and deceptions reflect documented practices—borrowed uniforms, repurposed travel documents, and nocturnal departures timed to market days or religious feasts. The resulting interplay of fact and invention sustains a credible stage on which characters act, without obliging the reader to master every statute or political faction by name. Lastly, Sir Percy Hits Back functions as both mirror and critique. It mirrors the 1790s by dramatizing the reach of revolutionary committees and tribunals, the contingencies of identity papers, and the overlapping crises of war and scarcity. It critiques the era by celebrating loyalty, clemency, and courage over ideological purity and bureaucratic zeal. Written in the interwar period, it also reflects contemporary apprehensions, suggesting that the dangers of politicized justice and mass suspicion are not confined to one decade, and that private conscience can, at moments, check public terror.
Author Biography
Baroness Emma Orczy (1865–1947) was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright whose work bridged late Victorian, Edwardian, and interwar popular culture. She is best known for creating the Scarlet Pimpernel, a character whose secret identity and dashing rescues helped shape the modern masked-hero tradition. Writing historical romances, adventures, and detective fiction, Orczy achieved wide popular success and lasting cultural visibility through stage, book, and screen adaptations. Her narratives favored dramatic pace, chivalric ideals, and clear moral frameworks, reflecting a conservative outlook alongside a strong sense of national loyalty. Although critics were often divided, her stories became touchstones of twentieth-century popular storytelling.
Raised in continental Europe before settling in Britain in the 1880s, Orczy received formal art training at the West London School of Art and at Heatherley School of Fine Art. This visual education informed her descriptive style and feel for staging scenes. Exposure to Parisian and London theaters, serial magazine culture, and the historical romance tradition encouraged a taste for melodrama and swashbuckling intrigue. Her cosmopolitan background, multilingual experience, and encounters with European history shaped her enduring preference for settings marked by political upheaval and grand gestures, while British popular theater provided a template for crisp dialogue, crowd-pleasing reversals, and vivid characterization.
Orczy began her career with modest success as an artist before turning to fiction. Her early novels, including The Emperor’s Candlesticks (1899), established her interest in intrigue and historical settings but drew limited attention. The decisive breakthrough came on the stage. Working with her husband, the artist and writer Montagu Barstow, she developed The Scarlet Pimpernel as a play. Premiering in the early 1900s and reaching London soon afterward, the production—starring Fred Terry and Julia Neilson—became a long-running West End hit. Orczy swiftly novelized the material, and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) secured her international reputation as a popular storyteller.
The Scarlet Pimpernel inaugurated a substantial cycle of sequels and related tales that expanded the character’s world and audience. Notable titles include I Will Repay, The Elusive Pimpernel, El Dorado, Lord Tony’s Wife, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Hits Back, and Sir Percy Leads the Band. Orczy sustained reader interest through brisk plotting, romantic peril, and recurring motifs of disguise, loyalty, and daring stratagems. The series’ emphasis on a concealed aristocratic hero who outwits revolutionary foes resonated widely and was repeatedly adapted for film, radio, and television, reinforcing the character’s transmedia appeal.
Beyond the Pimpernel cycle, Orczy contributed significantly to early detective fiction. Her “Old Man in the Corner” stories, first published in magazines and later collected, presented an armchair detective whose analytical conversations offered elegant puzzles without onstage violence. She also created Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910), an early example of a female professional investigator in popular fiction. Alongside these, Orczy wrote a range of historical romances—among them The Nest of the Sparrowhawk and The Laughing Cavalier—that showcased her taste for period atmosphere, courtly intrigue, and moral confrontation, extending her reputation beyond a single franchise.
Contemporary critics often regarded Orczy’s work as unabashedly melodramatic, yet her command of suspense and archetype proved enduring with readers. Her fiction consistently valorized courage, honor, and individual initiative against the pressures of mass politics and revolutionary upheaval. During the First World War she expressed public support for the British war effort, a stance consistent with the patriotic and conservative ethos of her narratives. While scholarly opinion has varied, later commentators have noted how her blend of romantic adventure, theatrical construction, and serial storytelling anticipated enduring conventions in popular genre fiction.
Orczy continued to publish into the 1930s, and her creations flourished in adaptation, notably the 1934 film The Scarlet Pimpernel, which helped cement the character’s international fame. She spent her later years in Britain and died in 1947. Her legacy rests on a singular contribution to modern popular mythology: the resourceful masked champion with a guarded identity, operating between salon and street, stage and novel. The Scarlet Pimpernel remains a fixture of revivals and new interpretations, while her detective tales attract ongoing interest for their early innovations. Orczy’s work endures as a touchstone of historical adventure and narrative panache.
SIR PERCY HITS BACK
Chapter I
On the spot where the Hôtel Moderne now rears its more ambitious head, there stood at that time a cottage with sloping red-tiled roof and white-washed walls. It was owned by one Baptiste Portal, an old peasant of the Dauphiné, who dispensed refreshments to travellers and passers-by, as his father and grandfather had done before him, in the shape of somewhat thin vin du pays and an occasional glass of eau-de-vie, while he spent his slack time chiefly in grumbling at the fact that the new posting-inn on the high-road had taken all his trade away. He did not see the necessity of the posting-inn, did not old Baptiste, nor for a matter of that of the high-road or the post-chaise. Before all these new notions had come into the heads of the government people up in Paris, travellers had been content to come squelching through the mud on the back of a good horse, or come ploughing through inches of dust in the old coche. So why not now? And was not the old wine of Les Amandiers as good and better than the vinegar dispensed at the more pretentious posting-inn? The place was called Les Amandiers because at the back of the house there were two anæmic almond-trees with gaunt, twisted arms which covered themselves in the spring with sickly blooms, and in the summer with dust. In front of the house, up against the white-washed wall, there was a wooden bench on which Baptiste's privileged customers were wont to sit on fine evenings, to drink their vin du pays and join the old man in his wholesale condemnation of the government "up in Paris" and its new-fangled ways. From this vantage-point a glorious view was obtained over the valley of the Buëche, and beyond Laragne as far as the peaks of Pelvoux: whilst to the right towered in the distance the grand old citadel of Sisteron with its turrets and fortifications dating from the fourteenth century, and the stately church of Notre Dame. But views and winding rivers, snowy peaks and mediæval fortresses did not interest Baptiste Portal's customers nearly as much as the price of almonds or the alarming increase in the cost of living.
Now on this particular afternoon in May the mistral[1] was blowing mercilessly across the valley from over the snows of Pelvoux, and the cold and the dust had driven all the good Portal's customers indoors. The low-raftered room, decorated with strings of onions which hung from the ceiling together with a bunch or two of garlic, of basil and other pot-herbs, and perfumed also with the aroma of the pot-au-feu simmering in the kitchen, had acquired just that right atmosphere, cosy, warm and odorous, beloved of every true man born in Dauphiné. It was a memorable afternoon, remembered long afterwards and retold by the gossips of Sisteron and Laragne in all its dramatic details. But at this hour, nothing more dramatic had occurred than the arrival of a detachment of soldiers, under the command of an under-officer, who had come up from Orange, so they said, in order to fetch away the young men who were wanted for the army. They had demanded supper and shelter for the night.
Of course soldiers, as soldiers, were very much disapproved of by those worthies of Sisteron who frequented Les Amandiers, more especially now when what they did was to fetch away the young men for cannon-fodder, to fight the English and prolong this awful war which caused food to be so dear and hands for harvesting so scarce. But on the other hand, soldiers as company were welcome. They brought news of the outside world, most of it bad, it is true — nothing good did happen anywhere these days — but news nevertheless. And though at the recital of what went on in Paris, in Lyons or even as near as Orange, the guillotine, the tumbrils, the wholesale slaughter of tyrants and aristos, one shuddered with horror and apprehension, there were always the lively tales of barrack-life to follow, the laughter, the ribald song, and something of life seemed to filtrate into this sleepy half-dead corner of old Dauphiné.
The soldiers — there were a score of them — occupied the best place in the room, as was only fitting; they sat squeezed tightly against one another like dried figs in a box, on the two benches on either side of the centre trestle table. Old Baptiste Portal sat with them, beside the officer. Some kind of lieutenant this man appeared to be, or other subaltern; but oh dear me! these days one could hardly tell an officer from the rag-tag and bobtail of the army, save for the fact that he wore epaulettes. Now this man — but there! what was the use of comparing these ruffians with the splendid officers of the King's armies in the past?
This one certainly was not proud. He sat with his men, joked, drank with them, and presently he convened friend Portal to a glass of wine: "A la santé," he added, "de la République, and of Citizen Robespierre, the great and incorruptible master of France!"
Baptiste, wagging his old head, had not liked to refuse, because soldiers were soldiers and these had been at great pains to explain to him that the reason why the guillotine was kept so busy was because Frenchmen had not yet learned to be good Republicans.
"We've cut off the head of Louis Capet and of the widow Capet too," the officer had added with grim significance, "but there are still Frenchmen who are bad patriots and hanker after the return of the tyrants."
Now Baptiste, like all his like in the Dauphiné, had learned in childhood to worship God and honour the King. The crime of regicide appeared to him unforgivable, like that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost, which M. le Curé used vaguely to hint at, and which no one understood. In addition to that, Baptiste greatly resented His late Majesty King Louis XVI and his august Queen being irreverently referred to as Louis Capet and the widow Capet. But he kept his own counsel and silently drank his wine. What his thoughts were at the moment was nobody's business.
After that, talk drifted to the neighbourhood: the aristos who still clung to the land which by right belonged to the people. Neither Baptiste nor his customers — old peasants from the district — were a match for the lieutenant and his corporals in such discussions. They did not dare argue, only shook their heads and sighed at the coarse jests which the soldiers uttered against people and families whom every one in the Dauphiné knew and esteemed.
The Frontenacs for instance.
The talk and the jests had turned on the Frontenacs: people who had owned the land for as long as the oldest inhabitant could remember and God only knows how long before that. Well! it appeared that in the eyes of these soldiers of the Republic the Frontenacs were bad patriots, tyrants and traitors. Didn't Citizen Portal know that?
No! Portal did not — he had never been called "citizen" before, and didn't like it: he was just Baptiste to those who knew him, quoi? — Nor would he admit that the Frontenacs were traitors. There was Monsieur, who knew more about cattle and almonds than any man for leagues around. How could he be a bad patriot? And Madame, who was very good and pious, and Mademoiselle who was so ill and delicate. But on this there followed an altercation — stern rebuke of Baptiste from the officer for talking of "Monsieur," of "Madame" and "Mademoiselle." Bah! there were no aristos left these days. "Aren't we all citizens of France?" the lieutenant concluded grandiloquently.
Silence and submission on the part of all the groundlings which followed on the lieutenant's rebuke, somewhat mollified the latter's aggressive patriotism. He condescended to relate how he had been deputed to make a perquisition in the house of the Frontenacs, and if anything was found the least compromising, then the devil help the whole brood: their lives would not be worth an hour's purchase. In fact, in the lieutenant's opinion — and who better qualified to hold one? — the Frontenacs were already judged, condemned, and as good as guillotined. He held with the "law of the suspect," lately enacted by the National Assembly, did Lieutenant Godet.
Again much wagging of heads! "The Committees in all Sections," Godet now goes on airily, and proceeds to pick his teeth after that excellently stewed scrag-end of mutton, "the Committees in all Sections are ordered in future to arrest all persons who are suspect."
No one knows what is a Committee, nor yet a Section: but they are evidently fearsome things. But no matter about them: the thing is who are the "suspect" who are thus arrestable?
"The Frontenacs are suspect," the lieutenant explains whilst sucking his tooth-pick, "and so are all persons who by their actions — or — their writings have become — er — suspect."
Not very illuminating perhaps, but distinctly productive of awe. The worthies of Sisteron, those who are privileged to sit close to the centre table and actually to put in a word with the soldiers, sip their wine in silence. Just below the tiny window at the end of the room two charcoal-burners, or wood-cutters — I know not what they are — are lending an attentive ear. They dare not join in the conversation because they are comparative strangers, vagabonds really, come to pick up a few sous by doing menial work too lowering for a local peasant to do. One of them is small and slender, but looks vigorous; the other, much older, with stooping shoulders, and grey, lank hair that falls over a wrinkled forehead. He is harassed by a constant, tearing cough which he strives in vain to suppress out of respect for the company.
"But," the worthy Portal puts in tentatively, "how does one know Monsieur le — I mean citizen officer, that a person is in verity suspect?"
The lieutenant explains with a sweeping gesture of the tooth-pick: "If you are a good patriot, Citizen Portal, you are able to recognize a Suspect in the street, you can seize him by the collar then and there, and you may drag him off before the Committee, who will promptly clap him in prison. And remember," he added significantly, "that there are forty-four thousand Committees in France to-day."
"Forty-four thousand?" somebody exclaims.
"And twenty-three," Godet replies, gloating over his knowledge of this trifling detail.
"Forty-four thousand and twenty-three," he reiterates and claps the table with the palm of his hand.
"One in Sisteron?" some one murmurs.
"Three!" the lieutenant replies.
"And the Frontenacs are suspect, you say?"
"I shall know that to-morrow," rejoins the other, "and so will you."
The way he said those three last words caused every one to shudder. Over at the far end of the room, the charcoal burner, or whatever he was, had a tearing fit of coughing.
"'Tis little Fleurette who will weep her eyes out," good old Baptiste said with a doleful shake of the head, "if anything happens to Mad — to the citizens up at the château."
"Fleurette?" the lieutenant asked.
"She is Armand's daughter — Citizen Armand you know — why —— ?"
He might well stare, for the officer, for some unaccountable reason, had burst into a loud guffaw.
"Citizen Armand's daughter did you say?" he queried at last, his eyes still streaming with the effort of laughing.
"Yes, of course. As pretty a wench as you can see in Dauphiné. Why shouldn't Armand have a daughter, I'd like to know."
"Do tigers have daughters?" the lieutenant retorted significantly.
Somehow the conversation languished after that. The fate which so obviously awaited the Frontenacs who were known and loved, cast a gloom over the most buoyant spirits. Not even the salacious stories of barrack-life, on which the men now embarked with much gusto, found responsive laughter.
It was getting late too. Past eight o'clock, and tallow was dear these days. There was a cart-shed at the back of the house, with plenty of clean straw: some of the soldiers declared themselves ready for a stretch there: even the voluble officer was yawning. The regular customers of Les Amandiers took the hint. They emptied their mugs, paid over their sous, and trooped out one by one.
The wind had gone down. There was not a cloud in the sky, which was a deep, an intense sapphire blue, studded with stars. The waning moon was not yet up, and the atmosphere was redolent of the perfume of almond blossom. Altogether a lovely night. Nature in her kindest, most gentle mood. Spring in the air and life stirring in the entrails of the earth in travail. Some of the soldiers made their way to the shed, whilst others stretched out on the floor, or the benches of the room, there to dream perhaps of the perquisition to be made to-morrow and of the tragedy which would enter like a sudden devastating gust of wind into the peaceful home of the Frontenacs.
Nature was kind and gentle: and men were cruel and evil and vengeful[1q]. The Law of the Suspect! No more cruel, more tyrannical law was ever enacted within the memory of civilization. Forty-four thousand and twenty-three Committees to mow down the flower of the children of France. A harvest of innocents! And lest the harvesters prove slack, the National Convention has just decreed that a perambulating army shall march up and down the country, to ferret out the Suspect and to feed the guillotine. Lest the harvesters prove slack, men like Lieutenant Godet with a score of out-at-elbows, down-at-heels brigands, are ordered to scour the country, to seize and strike. To feed the guillotine in fact, and to purge the Soil of Liberty.
Is this not the most glorious revolution the world has ever known? Is it not the era of Liberty and of the Brotherhood of Man?
Chapter II
The perambulating army had now gone to rest: some in the cart-shed, some along the benches and tables or floor of the inn. The lieutenant in a bed. Is he not the officer commanding this score of ardent patriots? Therefore must he lie in a bed — old Portal's bed — whilst old Portal himself and his wife, older and more decrepit than he, can lie on the floor, or in the dog's kennel for aught Lieutenant Godet cares.
The two wood-cutters — or shall we call them charcoal-burners? — were among the last to leave. They had petitioned for work among the worthies here present: but money was very scarce these days and each man did what work he could for himself, and did not pay another to do it for him. But Papa Tronchet, who was a carpenter by trade and owned a little bit of woodland just by the bridge, close to Armand's cottage, he promised one of the men — not both — a couple of hours' work to-morrow: wood-cutting at the rate of two sous an hour, and then he thought it dear.
And so the company had dispersed: each man to his home. The two vagabonds — wood-cutters or charcoal-burners, they were anyhow vagabonds — found their way into the town. Wearily they trudged, for one of them was very old and the other lame, till they reached a narrow lane at right angles to the riverbank. The lane was made up of stone houses that had overhanging eaves, between which the sun could never penetrate. It was invariably either as damp as the bottom of a well, or as dry and wind-swept as an iron stove-pipe. To-night it was dry and hot: broken-down shutters, innocent of paint, creaked upon rusty hinges. A smell of boiled cabbage, of stale water and garlic hung beneath the eaves; it came in great gusts down pitch-dark stairways, under narrow doors, oozing with sticky moisture.
The two vagabonds turned into one of these doors and by instinct seemingly, for it was pitch dark, they mounted the stone stairs that squelched with grease and dirt underneath their feet. They did not speak a word until they came to the top of the house, when one of them with a kick of his boot threw open a door; it groaned and creaked under the blow. It gave on an attic-room with sloping ceiling, black with the dirt of ages, and with dormer window masked by a tattered rag that had once been a curtain. There was a wooden table in the centre of the room, and three chairs, with broken backs and ragged rush-seats, dotted about. On the table a couple of tallow candles guttered in pewter sconces.
One of the chairs was drawn close up to the table and on it sat a young man dressed in a well-worn travelling-coat with heavy boots on his feet, and a shabby tricorne hat on the top of his head. His arms were stretched out over the table and his face was buried in them. He had obviously been asleep when the door was so unceremoniously thrown open. At the sound he raised his head and blinked drowsily in the dim light at the new comers.
Then he stretched out his arms, yawned and gave himself a shake like a sleepy dog, and finally exclaimed in English! "Ah! at last!"
One of the vagabonds — the one namely who at Les Amandiers had appeared with bent shoulders and a hacking cough, now straightened out what proved to be a magnificent athletic figure, and gave a pleasant laugh.
"Tony, you lazy dog!" he said, "I've a mind to throw you downstairs. What say you, Ffoulkes? While you and I have been breaking our backs and poisoning our lungs with the scent of garlic, I verily believe that this villain Tony has been fast asleep."
"By all means let's throw him downstairs," assented the second vagabond, now no longer lame, whom his friend had addressed as Ffoulkes.
"What would you have me do but sleep?" Tony broke in with a laugh. "I was told to wait, and so I waited. I'd far rather have been with you."
"No, you wouldn't," Ffoulkes demurred, "for then you would have been dirtier than I, and almost as filthy as Blakeney. Look at him; did you ever see such a disgusting object?"
"By Gad!" rejoined Blakeney, surveying his own slender hands coated with coal-dust, grease and grime, "I don't know when I have been quite so dirty. Soap and water!" he commanded with a lofty gesture, "or I perish."
But Tony gave a rueful shrug.
"I have a bit of soap in my pocket," he said, and diving into the capacious pocket of his coat he produced an infinitesimal remnant of soap which he threw upon the table. "As for water, I can't offer you any. The only tap in the house is in the back kitchen which Madame, our worthy landlady, has locked up for the night. She won't have anything wasted, she tells me, not even water."
"Fine, thrifty people, your Dauphinois," commented Blakeney, wisely shaking his head. "But did you try bribery?"
"Yes! But Madame — I beg your pardon, Citizeness Martot — immediately called me a cursed aristo, and threatened me with some committee or other. I couldn't argue with her, she reeked of garlic."
"And you, Tony, are an arrant coward," Blakeney rejoined, "where garlic is concerned."
"I am," Tony was willing to admit. "That's why I am so terrified of you both at this moment."
They all laughed, and since water was not obtainable, Sir Percy Blakeney, one of the most exquisite dandies of his time, and his friend Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, sat down on rickety chairs, in clothes sticky with dirt, their faces and hands masked by a thick coating of grime. Down the four walls of the small attic-room fillets of greasy moisture trickled and mingled with the filth that lay in cakes upon the floor.
"I can't bear to look at Tony," Blakeney said with a mock sigh, "he is too demned clean."
"We'll soon remedy that," was Ffoulkes's dry comment.
And behold Sir Andrew Ffoulkes at close grips with Lord Anthony Dewhurst, and this in silence for fear of disturbing the rest of the house, and bringing attention on themselves. It was a sparring match in the best style, Blakeney acting as referee, its object — to transfer some of the grime that coated the clothes and hands of Sir Andrew on to the immaculate Lord Tony. They were only boys after all, these men, who even now were risking their lives in order to rescue the innocent from the clutches of a bloody tyranny. They were boys in their love of adventure, and in their hero worship, and men in the light-hearted way in which they were prepared for the supreme sacrifice, should luck turn against them.
The sparring match ended in a call for mercy on the part of Lord Tony. His face was plastered with grime, his hands as dirty as those of his friends.
"Tony," Blakeney said finally, when he called a halt, "if her ladyship were to see you now, she would divorce you."
Vent having been given to unconquerable animal spirits, there was a quick return to the serious business of the day.
"What is the latest?" Lord Tony asked.
"Just this," Sir Percy replied: "That those hellhounds have sent out detachments of soldiers all over the country to ferret out what they are pleased to call treason. We all know what that means. Since their iniquitous 'Law of the Suspect[2],' no man, woman or child is safe from denunciation: now with this perambulating army, summary arrests occur by the thousand. It seems that at any moment any of those brigands can seize you by the coat-collar and drag you before one of their precious committees, who promptly sends you to the nearest guillotine."
"And you came across a detachment of those brigands, I suppose."
"We have; Ffoulkes and I spent a couple of hours in their company, in the midst of fumes of garlic that would have reduced you, Tony, to a drivelling coward. I vow the smell of it has even infested my hair."
"Anything to be done?" Tony asked simply. He knew his chief well enough to perceive the vein of grim earnestness through all this flippancy.
"Yes!" Blakeney replied. "The squad of brigands who are scouring this part of France are principally after a family named Frontenac, which consists of father, mother and an invalid daughter. I had already found out something about them in the course of the day, whilst I carted some manure for a farmer close by. Beastly stuff, manure, by the way! I tried to get into touch with Monsieur, who is a stubborn optimist, and does not believe that any man could mean harm to him or to his family. I went to him in the guise of a royalist agent, supposed to have inside information of impending arrests. He simply refused to believe me. Well! we've met that type of man before. He will have a terrible awakening to-morrow."
Sir Percy paused for a moment or two, a deep frown between his brows. His keen intellect, alive to all those swift tragedies which he had devoted his life to countermine, was already at work envisaging the immediate future, the personages of the coming drama, husband, wife, invalid daughter; then the perquisition, the arrest, summary condemnation and slaughter of three helpless innocents.
"I can't help being sorry for the man," he said after awhile, "though he is an obstinate fool! but it is the wife and daughter whom we cannot allow those savage beasts to capture and to kill. I caught sight of them. The girl is pathetic, frail and crippled. I couldn't bear —— "
He broke off abruptly. No need to say more, of course; they understood one another these men who had braved death so often together for love of humanity and for love of sport. Blakeney silent, one firm, slender hand clutched upon the table, was working out a problem of how to rescue three helpless people from that certain death-trap which was already laid for them. The other two waited in equal silence for orders. The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel! pledged to help the innocent and to save the helpless[2q]! One to command, nineteen to obey: the two who were here in this filthy, dark attic-room were the chief's most trusted officers; but the others were not far away!
Seventeen others! scattered about the countryside, disguised, doing menial work in order to keep in touch with the population, spying, hiding in woods or huts; all of them under orders from their chiefs, and prepared for the call from him.
"Tony," Blakeney said at last, "you'd better find Hastings and Stowmaries at once and they must pass the word round to the others. I want three of them — they can draw lots for that — to go to the Four Oaks and there to remain until I can send Ffoulkes to them with full instructions. When you've done that, I want you and Ffoulkes to spend the night in and about Les Amandiers, and gather what you can of the projects of those brigands by keeping your ears open. I'll keep in touch with you from time to time."
"You think," Ffoulkes put in, "that we'll have trouble with the Frontenacs?"
"Not with the ladies, of course," Blakeney replied. "We'll get them safely out of the way before the perambulating army of jackals arrives. With God's help we ought to have time enough to gather a few valuables together. The trouble will be with that obstinate, tiresome man. I feel sure he won't move until the soldiers are hammering at his door. Anyway I shall know my way in and about the château by to-morrow morning, and will then get into touch with you both at Les Amandiers."
He rose: a tall, straight figure on whom the filthy clothes of a vagabond wood-cutter sat with strange incongruity. But even in this strange garb which was grotesque as well as degrading, there was an extraordinary dignity in the carriage of the head, the broad shoulders, the firm, long Anglo-Saxon limbs, but above all in the flash of the eyes beneath their heavy lids and in the quiet, low-toned voice so obviously accustomed to be heard and obeyed. The two others were ready on the instant to act according to instructions; to act without argument or question. The fire of excitement was in their eyes: the spirit of adventure, of sport for sport's sake had them in its grip.
"Do I go with you now, Blakeney?" Ffoulkes asked, as his chief had remained for a moment standing, as if following a train of thought.
"Yes," Blakeney replied. "And by the way, Ffoulkes, and you too, Tony, while you are at Les Amandiers try and find out about this girl Fleurette the old innkeeper spoke about. He said that the girl would cry her eyes out if anything happened to the Frontenacs. You remember?"
"I do. He also said that she was as pretty a wench as could be found in Dauphiné," Ffoulkes put in with a smile.
"Her father is named Armand," Blakeney rejoined.
"And the lieutenant called him a tiger, rather enigmatically I thought."
"This Fleurette sounds an engaging young person," Lord Tony commented with a smile.
"And should be a useful one in our adventure," Blakeney concluded. "Find out what you can about her."
He was the last to leave the room. Ffoulkes and Lord Tony had already gone down the stone staircase, feeling their way through the darkness. But Sir Percy Blakeney stood for a minute or two longer, erect, silent, motionless. Not Sir Percy Blakeney, that is, the elegant courtier, the fastidious fop, the spoilt child of London society, but the daring adventurer, ready now as so often before, to throw his life in the balance to save three innocent people from death. Would he succeed? Nay! that he did not doubt. Not for a moment. He would save the Frontenacs as he had saved scores of helpless men, women and children before, or leave his bones to moulder in this fair land where his name had become anathema to the tigers that fed on the blood of their kindred. The true adventurer! Reckless of risks and dangers, with only the one goal in view: Success.
Sport? Of course it was sport! grand, glorious, maddening sport! Sport that made him forget every other joy in life, every comfort, every beatitude. Everything except the exquisite wife who in far-off England waited patiently, with deadly anxiety gnawing at her heart, for news of the man she worshipped. She, perhaps, the greatest heroine of them all.
With a quick sigh, half of impatience, half of longing, Sir Percy Blakeney finally blew out the tallow-lights and made his way out into the open.
Chapter III
The house where Fleurette was born and where she spent the first eighteen years of her life, still stands about half-way down the road between Sisteron and Serres and close to Laragne, which was then only a village nestling in the valley of the Buëche. To get to it you must first go cautiously down the slope at the head of the old stone bridge, and then climb up another slope to the front door beside the turbulent little mill stream, the soft gurgle of which had lulled Fleurette to sleep ever since her tiny ears had wakened to earthly sounds.
The house is a tumble-down ruin now, only partly roofed in: doors and shutters are half off their hinges: the outside staircase is worm-eaten and unsafe, the white-washed walls are cracked and denuded of plaster; the little shrine above the door has long been bereft of its quaint, rudely painted statue of St. Anthony of Padua with the Divine Child in his arms. But the wild vine still clings to the old walls, and in the gnarled branches of the old walnut tree, a venturesome pair of blackbirds will sometimes build their nest.
A certain atmosphere of mystery and romance still lingers in the tiny dell, and when we fly along the road in our twentieth-century motor-car, we are conscious of this romantic feeling, and we exclaim: "Oh! how picturesque!" and ask the chauffeur to halt upon the bridge, and then get our Kodaks to work.
