I have still several Scarlet Pimpernel books to write about, but given what I have noted about the similar elements in their plots, I thought today I should move to one that is very different from the rest. This was the last Scarlet Pimpernel book, Mam’zelle Guillotine, which was published in 1940, 35 years after the first one.
The lady of the title is Gabrielle Damiens, who becomes the public executioner of the town of Artois. Her thirst for the blood of aristocrats is based on two factors, one the execution of her father who had been used by a group of aristocrats to push the king into action against revolutionaries, the other her incarceration when she seduces the son of one of them, the Vicomte Fernand de-Luque, whose prospective mother-in-law was the king’s mistress and uses imprisonment to stop the blackmail Gabrielle was attempting.
When she is finally set free because of the revolution, she becomes one of its leading lights. In Artois she captures de-Luque and his family and, though he and his son are freed by the Pimpernel, she is determined to eliminate the wife and two daughters.
But she is told to hold back since the Scarlet Pimpernel will doubtless try to rescue them, and this will be an opportunity to catch him. Chauvelin sends an agent for this purpose, who flirts with her, but then she is told that he is in fact the Pimpernel. The very different agent who informs her of this turns out however to be Sir Percy in yet another disguise.
Baroness Orczy has high fun in describing the woman’s infatuation, and the bizarre performances of Sir Percy, as two very different types of secret agent, neither of whom is in any danger of being caught. Entertaining too is the dance he leads her underlings, who are bemused by her indulging every whim of the supposed agent, but have no choice but to obey. And of course he succeeds in getting the Vicomtesse and her children safely away, leaving Gabrielle, whom he has taken with him for the ride, drugged in an inn.
Her humiliation complete, there is nothing left for her to do but kill herself. The novel does not assert this definitely, but our last sight of her is at a pool, the depth of which she cannot gauge, and next morning there is no sign of her, but the wig and other elements the Pimpernel had used to disguise himself are found on a rock.
The ending, and the account of the bitter experiences of her childhood, could well have made her a tragic victim of fate as much as a villain, but the grotesqueries Baroness Orczy introduces preclude this. But if the villainy that results from suffering is excessive here, so is that suffering, in line with a constant theme of the Scarlet Pimpernel books, the horrors of the ancient regime which the French Revolution got rid of, albeit at tremendous cost.