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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Noble Rogue," Baroness Emmuska Orczy crafts a captivating tale of adventure and intrigue, woven from the rich tapestry of 18th century Europe. This historical novel showcases her signature style, blending romanticism with a swashbuckling narrative that is both engaging and richly detailed. Set against a backdrop of political unrest, the story unfolds through the eyes of charismatic protagonists who navigate the treacherous waters of love and loyalty, entangled within a society where honor often clashes with betrayal. Orczy's careful attention to period detail, coupled with her deft character development, elevates this narrative, situating it within the broader context of her notable works exploring themes of nobility and bravery. Baroness Orczy, a Hungarian-born British writer, drew on her unique heritage and extensive knowledge of European history to pen this novel. Her background, enriched by the cultural upheavals of her time, informed her portrayal of both noble ideals and the complexities of human nature. As an advocate for the arts, she possessed an acute understanding of the societal dynamics at play, which inspired her to create stories that resonated with readers seeking both entertainment and reflection. For readers who appreciate historical fiction imbued with romance and adventure, "The Noble Rogue" offers a thrilling exploration of ethical dilemmas amidst a richly drawn historical setting. It is a testament to Orczy'Äôs talents and her ability to captivate audiences, rendering this book a must-read for lovers of classic literature and those seeking to immerse themselves in a world of honor and intrigue.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Noble Rogue
Table of Contents
Introduction
Honor moves in shadows where the law cannot follow. From its opening promise of intrigue to its poised finales, The Noble Rogue turns on the tension between public duty and private conscience, staging a game of masks in which generosity may look like transgression. Baroness Emmuska Orczy invites readers into a world where daring is measured not simply by audacity, but by the willingness to bear risk for others. The book’s pulse is romantic in the broadest sense—an assertion that courage and compassion can outmaneuver cynicism—yet its moral questions are sharpened by the cost of heroism and the ambiguities of justice.
This novel endures as a classic because it belongs to a tradition that Orczy helped crystallize: the charismatic gentleman-outsider whose ingenuity unsettles rigid systems. Her work popularized the thrilling paradox of a hero who is both insider and outlaw, a pattern that would echo through twentieth-century adventure and vigilante fiction. The Noble Rogue refines that pattern with theatrical flair and ethical bite, showing how style becomes a language of resistance. Not merely a period curiosity, it continues to attract readers who recognize in its swift reversals and daring stratagems a timeless meditation on courage, loyalty, and the uses—and limits—of disguise.
Baroness Emmuska Orczy, a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright, wrote during the early twentieth century, when serialized fiction and stage melodrama shaped popular taste. Her fluid movement between theatre and prose yielded narratives designed for momentum: scenes build like acts, entrances are purposeful, exits pointed. The Noble Rogue participates in this vibrant milieu, offering readers an experience that marries historical color with the immediacy of performance. It negotiates the transition from late Victorian sensibilities to modern anxieties, favoring ingenuity over brute force and emphasizing moral choice amid spectacle. In doing so, it demonstrates why Orczy’s fiction remains pivotal to the swashbuckling romance tradition.
Key facts frame our reading: The Noble Rogue is by Baroness Emmuska Orczy and belongs to her early twentieth-century output, the period in which she established her signature blend of historical adventure and romantic idealism. The book presents a narrative of peril, wit, and stratagem, centered on a figure whose nobility is proved in deeds more than titles. Without disclosing major turns, one can say the plot entwines high society’s polished rooms with the city’s more precarious margins, letting questions of identity and allegiance test every relationship. Orczy’s intent is to entertain while probing the ethics of action in a world of shifting appearances.
Part of the novel’s classic status lies in its craftsmanship. Orczy’s scenes are paced for maximum clarity and suspense, delivering crisp entrances, deft feints, and vivid tableaux that make moral stakes legible even as motives remain veiled. She balances brisk plotting with character beats that illuminate pride, tenderness, and the peculiar loneliness of those who must hide their better selves. The result is an adventure that feels both intimate and expansive: personal vows collide with public duties; cleverness rescues courage from futility. Readers turn pages for the escapades, but they stay for the humane intelligence that animates every confrontation and reprieve.
At the heart of The Noble Rogue stands a protagonist defined by a code—chosen, not inherited—whose resourcefulness disrupts the easy boundary between criminality and conscience. Orczy understands that affinity for a charming outsider rests not on rebellion alone, but on the discipline that makes rebellion purposeful. Around this figure orbit allies and adversaries whose convictions are tested by proximity to risk. Institutions in the novel often speak in the language of order, yet their claims are weighed against the quieter authority of mercy. The tension between reputation and reality supplies the book’s energy, urging readers to judge by conduct, not convention.
Orczy’s imagination delights in the theater of identity. Disguises, misdirections, and coded gestures are not mere tricks; they are strategies for survival and instruments of moral argument. The Noble Rogue explores how people fashion selves for the roles demanded by society, then smuggle truth through the seams of performance. In this terrain, courage is collaborative: allies learn to read one another’s signals, to trust what cannot be openly declared. The novel thereby examines friendship, loyalty, and the delicate ethics of secrecy, asking how far solidarity may justly go when candor would endanger both the mission and the people it aims to protect.
Without tying itself to a single historical crisis, the book evokes eras of upheaval in which shifting loyalties and fragile institutions heighten every choice. Orczy’s gift is to make political turbulence legible through personal stakes: a rescue attempted, a pledge kept, a boundary crossed for the sake of compassion. The result is a historical atmosphere that feels morally contemporary, inviting readers to consider how principle survives amid competing claims of law and order. The past here is not a museum; it is a mirror. By tracing the costs of bravery, the narrative insists that ethical clarity requires discomfort, risk, and relentless imagination.
Stylistically, The Noble Rogue displays the hallmarks that made Orczy’s name: sharp scene-setting, economical dialogue, and a relish for the choreography of pursuit and escape. Costumes and locales are not merely decorative; they signal social positions and motivate strategic choices. The prose favors propulsion without sacrificing nuance, delivering turns that feel earned rather than contrived. Readers encounter plot as puzzle, not machine: each feint answers a prior move, each revelation revises an earlier assumption. In this interplay of velocity and design, the novel exemplifies a school of storytelling whose pleasures are immediate and whose implications unfold long after the last page.
In literary history, Orczy’s broader achievement—epitomized by her famed gentleman-hero elsewhere—helped consolidate the archetype of the masked or concealed benefactor. The Noble Rogue participates in that lineage, offering a variation that underscores duty as a voluntary, perilous choice. The figure’s afterlife in popular culture is well documented, from swashbuckling capers to modern vigilante tales, yet Orczy’s version remains distinct: less about spectacle for its own sake than about the ethics of intervention. Consequently, the novel’s influence is best understood as a refinement of sensibility—a standard of wit, restraint, and moral purpose that later authors echo, adapt, or contend with.
For contemporary readers, the book’s allure lies in how it reframes questions we still ask: What do we owe one another when rules fail? How do we reconcile private obligation with public role? The Noble Rogue addresses these concerns not as treatise but as lived dilemma, staging scenes where empathy must think on its feet. Its romantic poise is neither coy nor naive; it proposes that elegance can be a form of discipline, a way to refuse brutality without surrendering effectiveness. In an age alert to performance and authenticity alike, the novel’s masked integrity feels newly, insistently relevant.
To approach The Noble Rogue is to encounter a compact of qualities: suspense that clarifies character, romance that dignifies resolve, and history that sharpens present concerns. Written by Baroness Emmuska Orczy in the early twentieth century, it joins her distinguished canon in celebrating ingenuity as a moral art. The book sustains its classic standing because it marries pleasure to principle, wrapping ethical inquiry in the irresistible momentum of adventure. Its themes—identity, loyalty, justice tempered by mercy—continue to resonate across generations. That resonance is the measure of its lasting appeal: a story that still speaks to the hearts and consciences of readers today.
Synopsis
Set against a backdrop of political unease and rigid social hierarchies, The Noble Rogue opens in an era where privilege and poverty sit side by side. Baroness Orczy introduces a world of salons, coaching inns, and shadowed byways, where appearances matter but character decides fate. The narrative establishes the tension between official authority and a form of private justice, hinting at a figure whose exploits unsettle both criminals and magistrates. The tone is brisk and adventurous, with careful attention to manners, codes, and the small signals by which reputations rise or fall. Early chapters seed rumors of a daring outlaw with unusually principled motives.
The central figure emerges as a gentleman of means whose public demeanor masks a second life. Polished, witty, and outwardly idle, he moves within aristocratic circles that underestimate him. In secret, he intervenes where the law proves slow or indifferent, selecting targets whose abuses are whispered about but rarely punished. Orczy sketches his code with clarity: harm no innocents, disdain cruelty, and prize wit over brute force. Associates, each chosen for discretion and competence, assist in schemes that require timing, disguise, and nerve. His reputation grows through tales told in taprooms and drawing rooms, though his identity remains a closely guarded secret.
An inciting incident triggers the main plot: a well-connected magnate pushes through measures that tighten control over dissent and enrich a narrow circle. The change brings hardship to vulnerable households, and a particular case of injustice reaches the protagonist. He takes notice when a victim lacks recourse and a legal remedy appears unlikely. The decision to act sets him at cross purposes with influential figures who control constables, informers, and magistrates. Orczy sharpens the conflict by depicting the public face of reform against its private costs, contrasting official proclamations with quiet consequences in lanes and kitchens.
A series of calculated interventions follows, designed as warnings rather than open confrontation. The noble rogue leverages rumor and spectacle to embarrass wrongdoers without triggering wide reprisals. Operations hinge on decoy messages, exchanged tokens, and rapid shifts of attire that enable passage from ballroom to back alley. An observant officer, newly tasked with restoring order, becomes a steady antagonist. He notes patterns, traces unusual expenditures, and questions servants who notice details others ignore. The contest becomes a measured duel of wits, with each move prompting a countermeasure, pushing both men to refine their methods and test their resolve.
Parallel to the developing contest, a young woman enters the narrative as an acute observer of the social scene. Connected to families implicated in the new policies, she senses contradictions between public virtue and private conduct. Her encounters with the protagonist, in both his polished and covert guises, introduce ambiguity. She is drawn to intelligence and courage yet wary of lawlessness. Orczy uses her perspective to examine class expectations, personal duty, and the cost of complicity. Invitations, rides, and chance meetings deepen her understanding, while her independence of mind complicates loyalties on both sides of the widening conflict.
As pressure mounts, the antagonist tightens surveillance and recruits informants within taverns and households. A minor confederate is threatened, exposing the vulnerability of those who lack rank or fortune. The protagonist must recalibrate, balancing caution with the need to act before punitive measures become irreversible. Plans grow more intricate, relying on carefully staged misdirection and the timing of public events that mask private movements. The woman’s role becomes pivotal when a document or conversation places her at risk if handled rashly. Moral lines blur: to shield the few, the hero risks the many who benefit from his secrecy.
The investigation narrows after a failed sting reveals inconsistencies in the rogue’s supposed methods. The officer revises his profile, discarding theatrical explanations and looking for a gentleman whose habits contradict his reputation. Meanwhile, the social calendar furnishes opportunities and dangers: a country house party, a charity subscription, and a crowded assembly room where glances speak louder than words. Clues accumulate from offhand remarks and servants’ routines. Orczy maintains momentum by alternating intimate conversations with brisk set pieces, allowing suspicion to circulate without a definitive accusation. Each chapter brings a tightening loop as proximity raises the chance of recognition.
The final movement assembles threads into a decisive undertaking aimed at exposing corruption and relieving those most imperiled by the new order. The plan demands cooperation among allies who must act without full knowledge of one another’s roles. Disguises reappear, not as theatrics but as tools to navigate walls built by class and custom. A choice looms between personal safety and a public gesture that could end the contest. The woman’s judgment becomes a fulcrum, weighing duty against conscience. The officer faces a similar test as evidence challenges his assumptions about justice, obedience, and the true nature of honor.
The aftermath clarifies the book’s central message: nobility rests in conduct rather than title. Without detailing final turns, Orczy emphasizes courage moderated by mercy, and cunning employed to restrain cruelty. The narrative closes its social panorama by returning to ordinary lives improved or protected by quiet acts of risk. The roles of authority and defiance are left in thoughtful balance, inviting readers to consider when laws uphold fairness and when conscience must intervene. Romance, if present, underscores compatibility of values rather than mere attraction. The Noble Rogue thus delivers an adventure shaped by principle, restraint, and the steady pursuit of right.
Historical Context
Set in Georgian Britain, The Noble Rogue unfolds against the world of early-to-mid eighteenth-century England, when the Hanoverian monarchy (George I, 1714–1727; George II, 1727–1760; and into George III, 1760–1820) presided over rapid social change. London was a vast, stratified metropolis of coffeehouses, clubs, theaters, and markets, ringed by commons and heaths that still felt perilously rural after dusk. The Home Counties—Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, Berkshire—formed a corridor of coaching roads linking the capital with Bath, Bristol, and the south coast. This geography, and a legal order harsh yet patchily enforced, created the stage on which a “gentleman of the road” could plausibly operate.
The novel’s milieu encompasses crowded courts and magistrates’ rooms near Covent Garden, coaching inns along the Great Western and Bath roads, and exposed stretches of Hounslow Heath, Epping Forest, Finchley Common, and Bagshot Heath. Before gaslighting and professional policing, travel after nightfall invited ambush. At the same time, aristocratic townhouses in St James’s, gaming rooms at White’s, and coffeehouses along Fleet Street symbolized privilege and influence. The contrast between glittering urban salons and vulnerable highways underwrites the book’s moral geography: a chivalric outlaw moving between spheres, negotiating both fashionable intrigue and the precarious justice of parish constables, watchmen, and Bow Street magistrates.
The highwayman phenomenon reached a notorious zenith between the 1720s and 1750s, propelled by expanding turnpike roads and increased coach travel. Turnpike trusts multiplied after the late seventeenth century (the first at Wadesmill, 1663), improving road surfaces and traffic—yet also concentrating wealth on predictable routes. Hounslow Heath, Finchley Common, Epping Forest, and Bagshot Heath became bywords for hold-ups. The lore drew on real figures such as Jack Sheppard (hanged 1724), Dick Turpin (executed at York, 1739), and earlier Claude Duval (1670), whose legend of gallantry persisted. In The Noble Rogue, episodes of refined banditry mirror this ambivalent culture that could glamorize crime while fearing it.
Highway robbery thrived because policing was local, fragmented, and often corruptible. Parish constables and night watchmen were poorly paid; manhunts relied on hue and cry, handbills, and rewards. Coaching inns fostered information networks—both for travelers and for those stalking them. Broadsides and ballads popularized the “gentleman of the road,” a figure operating by a self-imposed code, offering courteous theft and sometimes selective generosity. Orczy’s noble rogue distills that tradition, balancing bravura with scruple. The book’s duels of wits on moonlit roads emulate real tactics—softly spoken demands, masks, swift escapes—and draw on the paradox that improved mobility and commerce also created opportunities for predation.
By the later eighteenth century, highway robbery waned as patrols intensified and open land diminished, but in mid-century it posed a real hazard. Stagecoaches linked London to provincial centers; travel times shortened dramatically (London to Bristol in about two days by mid-1700s), concentrating targets on predictable schedules. The introduction of mail coaches in 1784 further professionalized routes and security, but earlier decades remained vulnerable. In The Noble Rogue, carefully timed holdups near coaching inns or on the Bath Road echo these logistical realities. The work’s fascination with masks, passwords, and clandestine post-chaises aligns with the period’s improvisational security culture and the criminal countermeasures it provoked.
The creation of the Bow Street Runners in 1749 under novelist-magistrate Henry Fielding, and then his half-brother Sir John Fielding, marked a turning point in urban law enforcement. Centered at Bow Street, the magistrates organized paid thief-takers, disseminated wanted notices, and coordinated with turnpike trusts and innkeepers. By 1805, a mounted patrol (the Bow Street Horse Patrol) further deterred highway robbery on approaches to London. The Noble Rogue frequently stages cat-and-mouse exchanges with competent magistrates rather than mere bumbling watchmen, mirroring this professionalization. The book’s tension derives partly from the rogue’s need to outwit a nascent but increasingly coordinated policing apparatus.
The Bloody Code—the expansion of capital statutes from roughly 50 offenses in 1688 to more than 200 by the early nineteenth century—defined the penal climate. The 1723 Black Act, passed against the masked “Waltham Blacks,” made over 50 new crimes (notably poaching and armed trespass) capital offenses. Property protection outweighed proportionality. Public hangings at Tyburn, branding, and transportation to America (until 1776) or later to Australia dramatized the state’s power. In Orczy’s tale, the noble rogue’s code stands against draconian law, recognizing that legality and justice often diverged. The specter of the gallows, rewards, and informers gives the book’s moral dilemmas historical bite.
The Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 placed loyalty, treason, and identity at the center of British politics. Backing James Francis Edward Stuart in 1715 and Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) in 1745, the movements advanced as far south as Derby before defeat at Culloden (16 April 1746) by the Duke of Cumberland. Subsequent Disarming Acts, the Dress Act (1746), and tighter surveillance reshaped highland society and heightened suspicion across the realm. The Noble Rogue reflects this climate of clandestine networks, secret sympathies, and coded loyalties: a chivalric outlaw can plausibly aid fugitives, misdirect pursuers, or navigate ambiguous allegiances in a Britain jittery about sedition and informers.
Smuggling flourished along the Kent and Sussex coasts, fueled by high duties on tea, brandy, and silk. The Hawkhurst Gang (c. 1735–1749), operating from the Weald to the Channel, exemplified organized violence—raiding customs houses, intimidating witnesses, and culminating in pitched clashes like the 1747 fight at Goudhurst. Government responses included increased excise patrols and exemplary hangings. The novel’s web of informants, secret storage barns, and nocturnal rides through marsh and downland echoes these underworld economies. The noble rogue’s selective collusion or conscientious refusal dramatizes the period’s contested “moral economy,” where communities sometimes shielded smugglers against a remote, extractive state.
The Gin Craze, peaking in the 1730s–1740s, transformed urban life. Legislative liberalization and cheap grain spirits spurred production; by 1743, gin output reached millions of gallons and per capita consumption in London soared. The 1736 Gin Act faltered amid evasion and unrest, but William Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” (1751) captured the crisis, and the 1751 Gin Act imposed licensing and retail controls. Public order, crime, and health intertwined. In The Noble Rogue, scenes of poverty, tavern culture, and desperate petty offenders mirror this backdrop, setting the protagonist’s aristocratic honor against urban misery and showing why “polite” crime could appear paradoxically principled beside social ruin.
The enclosure movement—piecemeal across the eighteenth century and accelerating after 1760—converted common fields into private holdings through Parliamentary Acts and local agreements. Displacement of smallholders and cottagers, combined with seasonal unemployment, sharpened rural hardship and migration to London. Rising grain prices and declining customary rights encouraged poaching and theft framed as survival rather than vice. Orczy’s noble rogue, though fictional, inhabits a landscape shaped by enclosure’s winners and losers. His selective generosity to tenants, ostlers, or widows, and his contempt for rapacious landlords, registers the social strain that made both sympathy for outlaws and demands for harsher property laws appear simultaneously plausible.
Eighteenth-century politics ran on patronage, pocket boroughs, and sociability anchored in clubs and coffeehouses. Rotten boroughs like Old Sarum or Dunwich elected MPs with handfuls of voters; grandees dispensed offices and favors. White’s (founded 1693) and, later, Brooks’s (1764) incubated alliances and wagers; coffeehouses on Fleet Street and in Covent Garden churned pamphlets and rumor. Electoral bribery and influence-peddling were endemic before the 1832 Reform Act. The Noble Rogue mirrors this milieu in salons, gaming rooms, and backstairs intrigue. The protagonist’s leverage—information, scandal, or covert aid—exposes how honor and reputation could be weaponized within a political system tilted toward wealth and birth.
Dueling, though illegal, persisted as an aristocratic mechanism for negotiating insult and honor. The fatal 1712 duel between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun, and the 1763–1765 Wilkes affairs (including John Wilkes’s 1763 duel with Samuel Martin), show its perils and political entanglements. Codes emphasized formal challenges, seconds, measured distance, and pistols at dawn on Hampstead Heath or in Hyde Park. Orczy’s noble rogue operates within that honor culture: courage, keeping one’s word, and sparing a fallen opponent bear as much weight as statute law. The duel’s ritualized violence provides a framework for his measured defiance of vulgar cruelty or corrupt authority.
Criminal justice was a public spectacle. Trials at the Old Bailey drew crowds; condemned prisoners processed from Newgate to Tyburn, where the “Triple Tree” hosted hangings until 1783, when executions moved to Newgate. Gallows sermons, printed confessions, and ballads turned punishment into cautionary theater. Transportation sentences and branding underscored a punitive order fixated on property offenses. The Noble Rogue’s risks are historically concrete: a misstep means Newgate, the press of the mob, and a scaffold. By situating peril within this ritualized theater of justice, the book’s moral contrasts—mercy versus spectacle, honor versus opportunist informers—gain resonance.
Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865–1947), born to a Hungarian gentry family, grew up with stories of upheaval that followed the 1848–1849 revolutions in the Habsburg lands. Although she was born later, family memory of aristocratic vulnerability, Austrian repression, and Russian intervention (1849) shaped her anti-revolutionary outlook. The family left Hungary, lived in Brussels and Paris, and settled in London by 1890. Writing in Edwardian Britain amid anxieties about socialism and, later, Bolshevism, Orczy valorized hierarchy and personal honor over popular tumult. The Noble Rogue thus mirrors eighteenth-century disorders—Jacobitism, mobs, smuggling—through a twentieth-century conservative lens wary of mass politics and sympathetic to paternalist nobility.
As social critique, the book juxtaposes a draconian legal regime—the Bloody Code, informers, rewards—with a protagonist whose ethics prioritize mercy, proportionality, and responsibility to the weak. It exposes how class and wealth shaped outcomes: an aristocrat’s ruin could be reputational, a poor ostler’s ruin mortal. Magistrates and thief-takers are shown as capable but also incentivized by fees and patronage. By dramatizing how a code of honor can be more just than statute, the narrative criticizes a penal culture that equated property with virtue and poverty with vice, urging readers to question where justice lies when law and equity diverge.
Politically, the work indicts patronage, electoral corruption, and the social theater of honor as tools of exclusion while refusing the opposite extremity of mob rule. Scenes in clubs and salons reveal how private interests steer public outcomes; scenes on the highway reveal how state authority can be both arbitrary and necessary. The noble rogue becomes a test case for legitimacy: who deserves obedience, and why? By affirming order grounded in conscience rather than sheer coercion, the book challenges eighteenth-century injustices—enclosure’s dispossessions, gin-soaked neglect, inequitable courts—while implicitly critiquing modern demagoguery that exploits popular misery without truly reforming it.
Author Biography
Baroness Emmuska Orczy was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright best known for creating The Scarlet Pimpernel, a touchstone of popular adventure fiction. Active from the late Victorian era through the interwar years, she wrote historical romances and early detective stories that helped shape modern popular genres. The Scarlet Pimpernel franchise made her a household name, spawning sequels and adaptations on stage and screen. Beyond that flagship work, she contributed influential experiments in crime fiction, including an armchair detective and an early female sleuth. Her narratives, typically fast-paced and melodramatic, balanced romantic chivalry with suspense, leaving a durable imprint on twentieth-century popular culture.
Orczy spent her childhood across continental Europe before settling in Britain in her youth. She studied art in London, notably at institutions such as the West London School of Art and Heatherley’s, and initially worked as an illustrator. Immersion in London’s theatre and the example of historical romance traditions helped shape her literary ambitions. Stage melodramas, the swashbuckling lineage associated with writers like Alexandre Dumas, and the commercial possibilities of the West End gave her a model for dramatic storytelling. This blend of visual training, theatrical awareness, and appetite for history informed her later prose: vivid tableaux, emphatic gesture, and set-piece scenes became hallmarks of her style.
Her earliest novels arrived at the turn of the twentieth century, with historical romances that began to define her interests. The Emperor’s Candlesticks appeared in the late 1890s, and The Tangled Skein followed soon after. Reception at first was modest, but these books established the terrain she would mine repeatedly: court intrigue, perilous journeys, and moral tests under pressure. Moving between prose and stagecraft, she started crafting stories with a keen sense of performance. Collaboration with her husband on dramatizations honed her instinct for dialogue and crowd-pleasing structure. This apprenticeship phase culminated in a theatrical breakthrough that would transform her career and public profile.
The Scarlet Pimpernel debuted as a stage play in the early 1900s and quickly became a West End triumph. She then novelized the story, and it became a bestseller. Set against the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the series follows an English aristocrat who, under a secret persona, engineers daring rescues. Sequels and related volumes appeared over decades, including I Will Repay, The Elusive Pimpernel, Eldorado, and The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Critics sometimes questioned her prose style, yet audiences embraced the mixture of romance, suspense, and gallantry. The work’s central conceit—masking identity to champion justice—proved especially resonant and widely imitated.
Orczy also made significant contributions to early crime fiction. Her “Old Man in the Corner” tales, first serialized in magazines and later collected, introduced an armchair detective who solved cases through pure ratiocination. In Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, she offered an early example of a woman professional investigator, anticipating later developments in the genre. Other titles, such as The Man in Grey and The Laughing Cavalier, extended her range across mystery and historical adventure. Magazine publication helped her refine compact, twist-driven narratives. These experiments broadened her reputation beyond historical romance, and scholars often credit her with shaping foundational tropes later taken up by Golden Age and pulp writers.
Her fiction consistently expressed admiration for order, honor, and personal courage, alongside a pronounced distrust of revolutionary violence. During wartime and the politically volatile early twentieth century, this outlook resonated with readers seeking reassurance in stories of rescue, loyalty, and sacrifice. Orczy continued to publish into the 1930s and 1940s, adding further installments to her established cycles and reflecting on her life and career in her autobiography, Links in the Chain of Life. While not all contemporaries shared her political sensibilities, she remained a visible public figure within popular literature, shaped by and responding to the mass-market theatre and fiction cultures of her time.
Orczy spent her later years in England and died in the late 1940s. The Scarlet Pimpernel endures in print and in regular revival on stage and screen, a testament to its durable premise and theatrical vitality. The character’s double life helped inspire later masked or costumed heroes, echoing through figures such as Zorro and, by extension, modern superheroes. Her detective stories retain historical interest for early experiments with armchair and female investigators. Contemporary readers and scholars view her with a mixed but attentive eye: some critique the conservatism of her revolutionary-era portrayals, while many continue to admire the narrative drive and imaginative flair of her best work.
The Noble Rogue
PART I
CHAPTER I
M. Legros, tailor-in-chief to His Majesty Louis XIV[1] and to the Court of Paris and Versailles, bowed himself out of the room; with back bent nearly double, and knees trembling in the effort, he receded towards the door even whilst Monseigneur the Archbishop spoke a final and encouraging benediction.
"Have no fear, my good Monsieur Legros," pronounced Monseigneur with urbane kindness; "your affairs shall come under the special notice of the Holy Father. Be of good cheer, right and justice are on your side.[1q] Solemn vows cannot be flouted even in these days of godlessness. Go in peace, my son; you are dismissed."
"And if the Holy Father—hem—I mean if Monseigneur would take cognizance of the fact—hem—that I will place—" stammered M. Legros with some confusion. "I mean, Monseigneur—that is—I am a man of substance—and if the sum of fifty thousand francs—or—or a hundred thousand—"
"Nay, my son, what would you suggest?" quoth Monseigneur with a slight lifting of elegantly-arched brows. "The thought of money doth not enter into the decrees of the Holy Father."
"I know—I know, Monseigneur," said M. Legros with ever-growing confusion. "I only thought—"
"An you thought, my son, of pleasing God by the bestowal of alms in these days of licentiousness and of evil luxury, then by all means do so in accordance with your substance—I will see to the proper distribution of those alms, good Master Legros—the two hundred thousand francs you speak of shall be worthily bestowed, our promise thereon."
M. Legros did not think of protesting. The sum mentioned by Monseigneur was a heavy one in these days, when the working and trading classes had but little left for their own pleasures once the tax collector had passed their way. But the worthy tailor had made no idle boast when he said that he was a man of substance; he was well able to pay a goodly sum for the gratification of his most cherished desire.
He received his final congé almost on his knees, then he disappeared through the doorway. Lacqueys to the right of him, lacqueys to the left of him, lacqueys all the way along the carpeted stairs down to the massive front door, formed a living avenue through which M. Legros now passed with his back not yet fully straightened out after its many humble curvatures.
Soon he reached the narrow, ill-ventilated street on which gave the great gates of Monseigneur the Archbishop's palace. Instinctively M. Legros gave a deep sigh of content and relief, inhaling the fresh autumnal air which could not altogether be excluded even from these close purlieus where roof almost met roof overhead, and evil-smelling gutters overflowed along the roughly-constructed pavements.
The good master tailor had succeeded passing well in his momentous errand. Monseigneur had been overgracious, and two hundred thousand francs was after all only a small sum to come out of Rose Marie's ample marriage portion. M. Legros now walked with a brisk step along the right bank of the Seine, then crossing the Pont Neuf he found himself near the Châtelet prison, and thence by narrow by-paths at his own front door in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie.
Here he gave a sharp rap with the polished brass knocker, and within a very few seconds the door was opened and an anxious feminine voice hailed him from out the darkness of the narrow passage.
"Eh bien?—Monseigneur?—What did he say?"
M. Legros closed the door behind him with great deliberation, then he turned, stretched out both arms and, catching the speaker round the shoulders, imprinted two well-sounding kisses on a pair of fresh young cheeks.
"He says," said the worthy bonhomme gaily, "that Rose Marie, the fairest maid in France, shall be called Countess of Stowmaries before the year is out, for right and justice and indissoluble marriage vows are all on her side."
A little gasp—which sounded almost like a hysterical sob—broke from the woman's throat. It seemed as if the news—evidently very anxiously expected—was overwhelmingly good. There was silence in the little passage for a moment, then the fresh voice, now quite cheerful and steady, said lightly:
"Let us go and tell maman!"
Together father and daughter went up the steep, slightly-winding stair which led to an upper story. Rose Marie, silent once more, felt as if her young heart would presently burst through her corselet, so rapidly did it beat with excitement and anticipation.
She followed her father into the large, cheerful-looking room which gave on the first landing. Here a bright fire blazed in an open hearth; blue cotton curtains hung on each side of the single, narrow window, through which the last rays of this October day struggled faintly.
A large iron stewpot, from which escaped a jet of savoury-smelling steam, stood invitingly upon the hob, and beside the hearth, wooden spoon in hand, her ample proportions carefully draped in a thick brown linen apron, stood Mme. Legros herself, the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the whole of Paris.
"Eh bien! Legros, 'tis good news then?" she asked with cheerful optimism, whilst a benevolent smile shone all over her round face, red as an Eydam cheese and quite as shiny and greasy, for Madame had been cooking and she was mightily hot.
"The best, Maman," came in hilarious accents from her husband; "our daughter shall be installed in her English castle before many moons are over. The Holy Father himself will interfere, and this—this—milor Stowmaries will have to obey at once—failing which 'twill be excommunication and nothing less than that."
M. Legros had thrown himself into the tall-backed chair, black with age and the smoke from many a previous stewpot, and had stretched out his legs before him, in order that his dutiful daughter Rose Marie might the more easily divest him of his high out-door boots.
Kneeling before her father, she performed this little service for him with all the grace of loving girlhood, and he cocked his cropped head on one side and looked down at her with eyes in which merriment struggled with happy tears.
She was so good to look at as she knelt thus on one knee, her fair hair—touched with the gold of the sun of her native Provence—falling in thick ringlets round her young face. She was so girlish and so pure, fresh as the hawthorn in May, and withal luscious to behold like a ripening fruit in June.
"Nay! nay!" said M. Legros with mock gravity, as he put his now stockinged feet to the ground and rose with a great show of ceremony; "this is no place for Madame la Comtesse of Stowmaries. She must not kneel at any man's feet, not even at those of her fond old father. Come to my arms, my girl," he added, once more resuming his seat, his voice breaking in the vain endeavour to seem flippant; "sit here on my knee. Maman, for the Lord's sake put down that spoon, and sit down like a Christian and I'll tell you both all that Monseigneur said to me."
With a happy little sigh Rose Marie jumped to her feet. Obviously her young heart was still too full for speech. She had said nothing, practically, since her first greeting to her father, since she had heard from him the good news—the confirmation of her hopes.
Her cheeks were glowing until they quite ached with the throbbing of the veins beneath the delicate skin, and the palms of her hands felt cold and damp with suppressed nervousness and excitement.
Obedient to her father's call, she came close to him and perched herself on his knee, whilst his arm sought her slender waist and clung to it with all the gentle firmness born of his fond paternal love, of his pride in the beauty and grace of his child.
Mme. Legros—somewhat reluctantly—had pulled the stewpot further away from the fire, and put her wooden spoon aside. Then she sat down opposite her lord and her daughter and said blandly:
"I am listening."
"Monseigneur was most affable," now began M. Legros, speaking with some pride at the recollection of his late reception in the Archbishop's palace, "but from the first he bade me to be brief, so as I had rehearsed the whole scene in my mind over and over again, and knew exactly what I wished to say to His Greatness, I was able to put our case before him in the most direct, most straightforward way possible. Now if you will listen very attentively and not interrupt me I will tell you word for word just what passed between Monseigneur and myself."
"Go on, Armand," said Madame; "I am burning with impatience and I'll promise not to interrupt."
As for Rose Marie, she said nothing, but from the expression in her eyes, it was obvious that she would listen attentively.
"Monseigneur sat at his desk and he was pleased to tell me to be seated. Then he said: 'Commence, my son; I am all attention.' He fixed his eyes upon me and I then began my narrative. 'My wife had a distant relative,' I said, 'married to an officer in the army of the English king. At a time of great pecuniary distress this fashionable lady bethought herself of her connection with the humble tailor of Paris and wrote to him an amiable letter suggesting a visit to his modest home.' That was so, was it not, Maman?" he asked, turning for confirmation to his buxom wife.
"Exactly so, Armand," she replied in assent; "except that the fashionable lady was at pains not to tell us that her husband was in prison for debt over in England and that she herself was almost destitute—and to think that I was such a simpleton as not to guess at the truth when she arrived with her little boy, and he with his shoes all in holes and—"
"Easy—easy, Mélanie," rejoined M. Legros tartly. "Am I telling you my adventures of this afternoon, or am I not?"
"But of a truth thou art telling us, Armand," replied fat Mme. Legros blandly.
"Then I pray you to remember that I said I would not be interrupted, else I shall lose the thread of my narration."
"But thou didst ask me a question, Armand, and I did answer."
"Then do not answer at such lengths, Mélanie," quoth the tailor sententiously, "or I shall be an hour getting through my tale, and that savoury stew yonder will be completely spoilt."
Harmony being thus restored under threat of so terrible a contingency, M. Legros now resumed his narrative.
"I did tell Monseigneur," he said with reproachful emphasis, "that at the time that Mistress Angélique Kestyon came on a visit to us in company with her small son, then aged six and a half years, but without nurse, serving or tiring woman of any kind, we were quite unaware of the distressful position in which she was, and in which she had left her lord and master over in England. I then explained to Monseigneur how Mistress Kestyon seemed over-pleased with the grace and beauty of our own child Rose Marie, who had just passed through her first birthday. She would insist on calling the wench Rosemary, pronouncing the name in an outlandish fashion, and saying that in England it stood for remembrance. A pretty conceit enough, seeing that our Rose Marie once seen would surely never be forgotten."
And a vigorous pressure on Rose Marie's waist brought an additional glow to the girl's bright eyes.
"At this point," continued M. Legros, "it pleased Monseigneur to show such marked interest in my story, that he appeared quite impatient and said with a show of irritation—which could but be flattering to me:—'Yes! yes! my son, but there is no need to give me all these trifling details. I understand that you are rich, are of somewhat humble calling, and have a daughter, and that the English lady was poor, if high-born, and had a son. Ergo! the children were betrothed.' Which, methinks showed vast penetration on the part of Monseigneur," added the worthy bonhomme naïvely, "and gracious interest in my affairs. Whereupon, warming to my narrative, I exclaimed: 'Not only betrothed, Monseigneur, but married with the full rites and ceremonials of our Holy Church as by law prescribed. My wife and I—so please Your Greatness—thought of the child's future. It has pleased God to bless my work and to endow me with vast wealth which in the course of time will all pass to our Rose Marie. But here in France, the great gentlemen would always look askance at the daughter of the man who made their coats and breeches; not so in England where trade, they say, is held in high esteem, and in order that our child should one day be as great a lady as any one in the land and as noble as she is beautiful, we wedded her to a high and mighty well-born English gentleman, who was own great nephew to one of the most illustrious noblemen in that fog-ridden country—the Earl of Stowmaries[2], so he is called over there, Monseigneur!' and you may be sure," continued M. Legros, "that I mentioned this fact with no small measure of pride."
"Well, and what did His Greatness say to that?" queried Mme. Legros, who would not curb her impatience, even for those few seconds whilst her man paused in order to take breath.
"Monseigneur did not seem over-pleased at seeing me display quite so much pride in empty titles and meaningless earthly dignities," rejoined M. Legros lightly. "His Greatness was pleased to rebuke me and to inform me that he himself was well acquainted with the distinguished English family who bears the name of Kestyon of Stowmaries. The Kestyons are all good Catholics and Monseigneur thought that this fact was of far greater importance than their worldly honours and their ancient lineage, and should have weighed much more heavily with us, Maman, when we chose a husband for our daughter."
"We should not have given Rose Marie to a Protestant, Armand; you should have told that to Monseigneur. No, not if he had been the King of England himself," retorted Mme. Legros indignantly.
"The King of England is as good a Catholic as any of us, so 'tis said," commented M. Legros, "but this is a digression, and I pray you, Mélanie, not to interrupt me again. I felt that His Greatness had lapsed into a somewhat irritable mood against me, which no doubt I fully deserved, more especially as Monseigneur did not then know—but 'tis I am digressing now," resumed the good man after a slight hesitation. "In less time than I can repeat it all, I had told Monseigneur how directly after the marriage ceremony had been performed, we found out how grossly we had been deceived, that le Capitaine Kestyon, the husband of Mistress Angélique, had been in a debtor's prison in London all the time that his wife was bragging to us about his high position and his aristocratic connections; we heard that the great Earl of Stowmaries not only refused to have anything to do with his nephew, who was a noted rogue and evil-doer, but that he had a son and three grandsons of his own, so that there were a goodly number of direct inheritors to his great title and vast estates. All this and more we heard after our darling child had been indissolubly tied to the son of the best-known scoundrel in the whole of England, and who moreover was penniless, deeply in debt, and spent the next ten years in extracting our hard-earned money from out our pockets."
The recollection of those same ten years seemed to have even now a terrible effect on the temper of M. Legros. Indignation at the memories his own last words evoked seemed momentarily to choke him. He pulled a voluminous and highly-coloured handkerchief from the pocket of his surcoat and moped his perspiring forehead, for choler had made him warm.
Mme. Legros—equally indignant in retrospect but impatient to hear Monseigneur's final pronouncement on the great subject—was nervously rapping a devil's tattoo on the table. Rose Marie's fair head had fallen forward on her breast. She had said nothing all along, but sat on her father's knee, listening with all her ears, for was not he talking about the people who would be her people henceforth, the land which would be her land, the man who of a truth was her lord and husband? But when Legros, with just indignation, recalled the deceits, the shifts, the mean, mercenary actions of those whose name she would bear through life, then the blush of excitement seemed to turn into one of shame, and two heavy tears fell from her eyes onto her tightly clasped hands.
"Father, Father!" cried fat Mme. Legros in horror, "cannot you see that you have made the child cry?"
"Then heaven punish me for a blundering ass," exclaimed Legros, with renewed cheerfulness. "Nay! nay! my little cabbage, there's naught to cry for now; have I not said that all is well? Those ten years are past and done with and eight more lie on the top of them—and if Monseigneur showed some impatience both at my pride and at my subsequent indignation, he was vastly interested, I can tell you that, when he heard that the son and three grandsons of the great English nobleman were by the will of God wrecked while pleasure-cruising together off the coast of Spain and all four of them drowned, and that the old lord himself did not long survive the terrible catastrophe, which had swept four direct inheritors of his vast wealth and ancient name off the face of the earth and into the sea. His Greatness became quite excited—and vastly amiable to me: 'Ah!' he said, 'then surely—you cannot mean—?' You see Monseigneur was so interested he scarce could find his words. 'Yes, so please Your Greatness,' quoth I with becoming dignity, 'the husband of our Rose Marie, the son of the capitaine who in life had been nought but a rogue, has inherited the title and the wealth of his great-uncle. He is now styled by the English the Earl of Stowmaries and Rivaulx, Baron of Edbrooke and of Saumaresque, and he has many other titles besides, and one of the richest men in the whole of England!' 'Mais, comment donc!' exclaims Monseigneur, most affably, and you'll both believe me, an you will, but I give you my word that His Greatness took my hand and shook it, so pleased did he seem with what I had told him. 'We must see the lovely Comtesse of Stowmaries!—Eighteen years ago, did you say, my son? and she was a baby then! The decrees of God are marvellous, of a truth!—And your Rose Marie a great English lady now, eh?—with a quantity of money and a great love for the Church!—By the Mass, my son, we must arrange for a solemn Te Deum to be sung at St. Etienne, before the beautiful comtesse leaves the sunny shores of France for her fog-wrapped home across the sea!' Nay! but His Greatness said much more than that. He spoke of the various forms which our thank-offering might take, the donations which would be most acceptable to God on this occasion; he mentioned the amount of money which would most adequately express the full meed of our gratitude to Providence, by being given to the Church, and I most solemnly assure you that he simply laughed at the very thought of the Earl of Stowmaries contemplating the non-fulfilment of his marriage vows. I pointed out to His Greatness that the young man seemed inclined to repudiate the sacred bond. We had not seen him since the ceremony eighteen years ago, and after our final refusal to further help his parents with money or substance, we had even ceased to correspond. His parents had gone to live in some far, very far-off land across the ocean, where I believe cannibals and such like folk do dwell. They had taken the boy with them, of course. We thought the young man dead, or if alive then as great a rogue as his father, and mourned that our only child was either a girl-widow, or the wife of a reprobate. ''Tis eighteen years,' I said, 'since those marriage vows were spoken.' 'Were they fifty,' retorted His Greatness, 'they would still be sacred. The Catholic Church would scorn to tie a tie which caprice of man could tear asunder. Nay! nay!' he added with sublime eloquence, 'have no fear on this matter, my son. Unless the Earl of Stowmaries chooses to abjure the faith of his fathers, and thereby cause his own eternal damnation, he cannot undo the knot which by the will of his parents—he being a minor at the time—tied him indissolubly to your daughter.' Thus spoke His Greatness, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Paris," concluded M. Legros, with becoming solemnity, "and in such words will the message be conveyed to the man who by all laws human and divine is the husband of Rose Marie Dieudonnée Legros, our only and dearly loved child."
There was silence in the small room now. The fast-gathering twilight had gradually softened all sharp outlines, covering every nook and cranny with a mantle of gloom and leaving the dying embers of the fire to throw a warm glow over the group of these homely folk: fat Mme. Legros in cooking apron of coarse linen, her round, moist face pale with excitement, the sleeves of her worsted gown rolled back over her shapely arms; the kindly tailor with rubicund face gleaming with pride and paternal love, one arm still encircling the cherished daughter whose future had been mapped out by him on such glorious lines, and she, the girl—a mere child, fair and slender, with great, innocent eyes which mirrored the pure, naïve soul within, eyes which still looked the outer world boldly in the face, which had learned neither to shrink in terror, nor yet to waver in deceit, a child with rosy, moist lips which had not yet tasted the sweet and bitter savour of a passionate kiss.
The silence became almost oppressive, for Mme. Legros dared not speak again, lest she irritate the mightily clever man whom God had pleased to give her as husband, and Rose Marie was silent because, unknown even to herself, in the far-off land of Shadows, the Fates who sit and spin the threads of life had taken in their grim and relentless hands the first ravellings of her own.
Vaguely now, for her ears were buzzing, she heard her father speak again, talking of Monseigneur's graciousness, of the intervention of the French ambassador at the Court of the King of England, of an appeal to the Holy Father who would command that the great English milor shall acknowledge as his sole and lawful wife, Rose Marie Legros, the daughter of the Court tailor of Paris.
It was so strange—almost uncanny, this intervention of great and clever gentlemen, of Monseigneur the Archbishop of Paris, whom hitherto she had only seen at a great distance passing through the streets in his glass coach or celebrating High Mass at the great altar in Notre Dame, of the King of England, whom she had once seen at a pageant in Versailles, actually talking to young King Louis himself, the greatest man in the whole world and most wonderful of all, of the Holy Father, second only on earth to le bon Dieu Himself—all, all of these great and marvellous people troubling about her, Rose Marie.
For the moment she could not bear to think of it all, and she supposed that she must outwardly have looked as strange as she felt herself to be from within, for maman suggested that the child was overwrought and must go to her room, where presently she should partake of fricassée of chicken and a glass of good red wine with a little clove and cinnamon in it, the panacea, in good Mme. Legros' estimation, for every ailment of body, mind or heart.
CHAPTER II
Rose Marie hardly knew how she reached the tiny room up under the sloping roof, which room was her very own.
She only realised that she longed to be alone to think matters out all by herself, and then to indulge in a long and happy cry.
Oh, yes! she was quite, quite sure that she was very happy, and that it was because of this great happiness which filled her heart to bursting, that she felt so very much inclined to cry.
Presently maman came in with the red wine and the fricassée and was horrified to find the child in tears.
"My pigeon, my little cabbage, but what ails thee, my jewel?" ejaculated the good old soul, as she hastily put down the platter and bottle which she was carrying and went to kneel beside the narrow bed in the wall, from the depths of which came ominous sounds of a girl sobbing.
"Nothing, Maman, nothing!" said Rose Marie, smiling at her mother's anxiety and hastily endeavouring to dry her tears.
"Nothing—nothing—" grumbled Mme. Legros, "one does not cry for nothing, my child—"
"And I am vastly silly, Maman, for doing it—but I assure you that it is nothing—and—and—"
The young voice broke in renewed sobs, and two arms were stretched forth from out the bed and sought the mother's kindly shoulder, whereon a strangely overburdened childish heart could sob itself out in perfect peace.
"There! there! my little cabbage," said Mme. Legros, trying with tender pattings of the soft fair hair to soothe this well-nigh hysterical outburst, "of a truth, thou hast been overwrought, and it was not right for father to speak of all this before thee. Thou didst not know that the young English lord had endeavoured to break his marriage vows, and that thy father and I have been working hard in order to bring influence to bear upon the rogue. Fortunately now we have succeeded, with the help of Monseigneur, so there is no need to cry, my cabbage, is there?"
"No, no, Maman, it is not that," said the girl more quietly; "I cannot quite explain to you what it is that made me cry—for I have known all along that milor[3]—now that he is a milor and passing rich—was anxious to forget us humble folk, who helped his parents in their need—I have felt the shame of that before now, and it never made me cry. But to-day—somehow—Maman, darling," she added, sitting up quite straight in bed and looking at her mother with enquiring eyes, whilst her fine brow was puckered in a deep frown of thought, "somehow I feel—I cannot quite explain how it is—I feel as if my old life was finished—quite, quite finished—as if nothing would ever be quite the same again—my little room here, the pink curtains, that chair over there—they do not seem the same—not quite, quite the same—Maman, cherie, I suppose you don't understand?"
And the great childish eyes sought anxiously the mother's face, longing for comprehension, for the explanation of an unaccountable mystery.
"No, my pigeon, I confess I do not understand," quoth worthy Mme. Legros drily, "for I do not see—nor would any sensible person admit—that a great English milor just because he is thy husband—can from all that distance, from the other side of the sea, change thy room and thy chair, nor yet thy curtains, though the latter, I will say, sorely need washing at the present moment," she added with sublime irrelevance.
The girl sighed. Maman for once did not understand. Nor of a truth did she understand herself. She had tried to explain it all but had signally failed—had only succeeded in suggesting something which of course was supremely silly.
"I'll tell thee how it is, Rose Marie," resumed Mme. Legros with firm decision, "thy stomach is in a disturbed condition, and a cup of cold camomile tea thou shalt drink to-morrow before rising. I'll see to the making of it at once,—for it must be brewed over-night to be truly efficacious,—and come back and give thee thy supper a little later on."
Mme. Legros struggled back to her feet, happy to have found in a prospective cup of camomile tea a happy solution for Rose Marie's curious mood. She took up the platter again, for the fricassée must be kept hot, and the child must eat some supper a little later on. The good woman's heart was filled with that cheerful optimism which persistently seeks the good side of every eventuality and nearly always finds it. In this case Mme. Legros failed to see that anything but good could come out of the present position. That same wonderful optimism of hers had not been altogether proof against the events of the past years, when she first began to realise that the marriage which she—more so than her husband—had planned in conjunction with Mistress Angélique Kestyon, was destined to prove a bar to her daughter's happiness.
In those far-off days eighteen years ago, Mme. Legros had still fostered in her homely bosom the—since then—aborted seeds of social ambition. Well-connected on her mother's side, with a good English family, she had wedded the Paris tailor for pecuniary rather than for sentimental reasons, and she had a sufficiency of sound common sense to understand that as a tradesman's wife she could not in these days of arbitrary class distinction aspire to remain within that same social circle to which her connections and parentage would otherwise have entitled her. But though the seeds of ambition lay dormant in the homely soil of her husband's back shop, they were not then altogether destroyed.
Mélanie de Boutillier had been well past her youth when she married Armand Legros; when her baby girl was born, and the mother with justifiable pride realised that the child was passing fair, those same seeds once more began to germinate. The visit of the English relative—high-born, well-connected and accompanied by a boy not yet seven years of age, brought them to final perfection. What Mélanie de Boutillier had failed to obtain, Rose Marie Legros should possess in measureless plenty, and little Rupert Kestyon, great nephew of an English milor, should be the one to shower the golden gifts on her.
