The Scarlet Pimpernel

From a pair of Marxist crime writers to an author who had a nobler lineage and more names than both of them put together: Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála "Emmuska" Orczy de Orczi, known, to the relief of printers and book-cover designers everywhere, as Baroness Orczy and to readers as the author of The Old Man in the Corner (1909) and The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905).

The opening chapter of the latter, combined with the circumstances of Baroness Orczy's life, roused my interest. Here's a bit of the book:

"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."

Here's a bit from the life:

"Her parents left Hungary in 1868, fearful of the threat of a peasant revolution."

(I figured out the Scarlet Pimpernel's identity before Marguerite St. Just did even though she is supposed, in the novel, to be the most brilliant woman in all Europe.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011