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Zusatztext “Arguably the best adventure story ever published and certainly the most influential that appeared during the early decades of the twentieth century.”— Gary Hoppenstand Informationen zum Autor Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865-1947), an only child of Austro-Hungarian nobles, lived most of her life in London, where she built her reputation as an established novelist, playwright, and artist. Also a success on stage, her most famous novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel , spawned a series of books featuring its cast of characters. Klappentext The first and most successful in the Baroness's series of books that feature Percy Blakeney! who leads a double life as an English fop and a swashbuckling rescuer of aristocrats! The Scarlet Pimpernel was the blueprint for what became known as the masked-avenger genre. As Anne Perry writes in her Introduction! the novel "has almost reached its first centenary! and it is as vivid and appealing as ever because the plotting is perfect. It is a classic example of how to construct! pace! and conclude a plot. . . . To rise on the crest of laughter without capsizing! to survive being written! rewritten! and reinterpreted by each generation! is the mark of a plot that is timeless and universal! even though it happens to be set in England and France of 1792.” Chapter I Paris: September 1792 A surging, seething, murmuring crowd, of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation’s glory and his own vanity. During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the barricades for the night. And so the crowd rushed away from the Place de la Grève and made for the various barricades in order to watch this interesting and amusing sight. It was to be seen every day, for those aristos were such fools! They were traitors to the people of course, all of them, men, women, and children, who happened to be descendants of the great men who since the Crusades had made the glory of France: her old noblesse. Their ancestors had oppressed the people, had crushed them under the scarlet heels of their dainty buckled shoes, and now the people had become the rulers of France and crushed their former masters—not beneath their heel, for they went shoeless mostly in these days—but beneath a more effectual weight, the knife of the guillotine. And daily, hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims—old men, young women, tiny children, even until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen. But this was as it should be: were not the people now the rulers of France? Every aristocrat was a traitor, as his ancestors had been before him: for two hundred years now the people had sweated, and toiled, and starved, to keep a lustful court in lavish extravagance; now the descendants of those who had helped to make those courts brilliant had to hide for their lives—to fly, if they wished to avoid the tardy vengeance of the people. And they did try to hide, and tried to fly: that was just the fun of the whole thing. Every afternoon before the gates closed and the market carts went out in procession by the various barricades, some fool of an aristo endeavoured to evade the clutches of the Committee of Public Safety...
