THE
SCARLET
PIMPERNEL
BY
BARONESS
ORCZY
Contents
I. PARIS: SEPTEMBER, 1792
II. DOVER: "THE FISHERMAN'S REST"
III. THE REFUGEES
IV. THE LEAGUE OF THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL
V. MARGUERITE
VI. AN EXQUISITE OF '92
VII. THE SECRET ORCHARD
VIII. THE ACCREDITED AGENT
IX. THE OUTRAGE
X. IN THE OPERA BOX
XI. LORD GRENVILLE'S BALL
XII. THE SCRAP OF PAPER
XIII. EITHER
XIV. ONE O'CLOCK PRECISELY!
XV. DOUBT
XVI. RICHMOND
XVII. FAREWELL
XVIII. THE MYSTERIOUS DEVICE
XIX. THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL
XX. THE FRIEND
XXI. SUSPENSE
XXII. CALAIS
XXIII. HOPE
XXIV. THE DEATH
XXV. THE EAGLE AND THE FOX
XXVI. THE JEW
XXVII. ON THE TRACK
XXVIII. THE PERE BLANCHARD'S HUT
XXIX. TRAPPED
XXX. THE SCHOONER
XXXI. THE ESCAPE
THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL
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 Greve 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 a more effectual weight, the knife of the guillotine.
And daily, hourly, the
hideousinstrument of
torture claimed
its many victims--old men, young women, tiny children 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. In various
disguises, under various
pretexts, they tried to slip through the barriers, which were so well
guarded by citizen soldiers of the Republic. Men in women's clothes,
women in male
attire, children
disguised in beggars' rags: there were
some of all sorts: CI-DEVANT counts, marquises, even dukes, who
wanted to fly from France, reach England or some other equally
accursed country, and there try to rouse foreign feelings against the
glorious Revolution, or to raise an army in order to
liberate the
wretched prisoners in the Temple, who had once called themselves
sovereigns of France.
But they were nearly always caught at the barricades, Sergeant
Bibot especially at the West Gate had a wonderful nose for scenting an
aristo in the most perfect
disguise. Then, of course, the fun began.
Bibot would look at his prey as a cat looks upon the mouse, play with
him, sometimes for quite a quarter of an hour,
pretend to be
hoodwinked by the
disguise, by the wigs and other bits of theatrical
make-up which hid the
identity of a CI-DEVANT noble marquise or count.
Oh! Bibot had a keen sense of
humour, and it was well worth
hanging round that West Barricade, in order to see him catch an aristo
in the very act of
trying to flee from the
vengeance of the people.
Sometimes Bibot would let his prey
actually out by the gates,
allowing him to think for the space of two minutes at least that he
really had escaped out of Paris, and might even manage to reach the
coast of England in safety, but Bibot would let the
unfortunate wretch
walk about ten metres towards the open country, then he would send two
men after him and bring him back, stripped of his
disguise.
Oh! that was
extremely funny, for as often as not the
fugitive would prove to be a woman, some proud marchioness, who looked
terribly
comical when she found herself in Bibot's clutches after all,
and knew that a
summary trial would await her the next day and after
that, the fond
embrace of Madame la Guillotine.
No wonder that on this fine afternoon in September the crowd
round Bibot's gate was eager and excited. The lust of blood grows
with its
satisfaction, there is no satiety: the crowd had seen a
hundred noble heads fall beneath the guillotine to-day, it wanted to
make sure that it would see another hundred fall on the morrow.
Bibot was sitting on an overturned and empty cask close by the
gate of the barricade; a small
detachment of citoyen soldiers was
under his command. The work had been very hot
lately. Those cursed
aristos were becoming terrified and tried their hardest to slip out of
Paris: men, women and children, whose ancestors, even in
remote ages,
had served those
traitorous Bourbons, were all
traitors themselves and
right food for the guillotine. Every day Bibot had had the
satisfaction of unmasking some
fugitive royalists and sending them
back to be tried by the Committee of Public Safety, presided over by
that good
patriot, Citoyen Foucquier-Tinville.