In the course of last year, I wrote about several books by Baroness Orczy. Her fame rests on her stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel, who rescued prospective victims of the French Revolution, but she in fact wrote many more books, about very different historical characters.
I had begun reading her books which were at Roshanara late in the previous year, but I started with tales of different periods, one set in the time of Napoleon III in the middle of the 19th century, and another about the Russian Revolution. It was only in the latter part of last year that, encouraged by Dr Narme Wickremesinghe, who devoured the Pimpernel books I had found, I started on her great hero, and was so hooked that by the end of the year I had finished all ….. books about him that were there. And I also read The First Sir Percy, which was about an ancestor of the 18th century Percy Blakeney who was the Scarlet Pimpernel, that book set in Holland when it was in revolt against the Catholic Habsburg empire.
In different articles last year I wrote about the following books
- The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905)
- I Will Repay (1906)
- Eldorado (1913)
- The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1922)
- Sir Percy Hits Back (1927)
In that order except that I combined the second and the fourth. This was because the plot in both sprang from the actions of a woman, as it had done in the first book, whereas in Eldorado the action arose from the folly of a man. This was Armand St. Just, the brother of Sir Percy’s wife Marguerite, whose well intentioned mistakes had prompted the action of the first book.
Marguerite’s good intentions also prompted the action of The Elusive Pimpernel, one of five other Pimpernel books I read last year, though fearing overkill I did not write about them at the time. But at an interval of a quarter of a year, I thought it would be well to resume the tale of this preposterously heroic figure.
The Elusive Pimpernel exemplifies Baroness Orczy’s skill in telling the same story again and again, but with such variations that it seems to us fresh each time, and we are enthralled by the suspense she creates. Here she introduces an actress, like Theresia in The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel, whom Marguerite invites to their home where she precipitates a scene which ends in Sir Percy having to fight a duel with his arch enemy Chauvelin. This has to be in France since duelling is illegal in England.
Having ensured that Sir Percy would be in France, Chauvelin then gets Margaret there too, since as usual she thinks she must be by Percy’s side and uses a false passport which the actress provides so that she is arrested as she lands.
Chauvelin threatens to kill the people of Boulogne if Marguerite escapes from her prison, but needless to say Percy manages to force Chauvelin to give everyone a safe conduct, and gets away with his wife. That Chauvelin should succumb again to his subterfuges beggars belief, but then credibility is now what the Scarlet Pimpernel books are about.
The last picture here, after the original edition, the author, and two other editions, is of Cecil Humphrey who played the Pimpernel in a 1919 silent film, the only one of this book since the 1950 film which has this title has the storyline of the first book, ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’.