The Scarlet Pimpernel

Paris, 1792: the tumbrils are running, and an unknown Englishman is taking condemned aristocrats out of the city under the noses of the Committee, leaving behind him a card marked with a small red flower. In London, Sir Percy Blakeney is the emptiest fop in society, and his French wife Marguerite is being made to choose between her brother’s life and her husband’s.

Baroness Orczy wrote the story first as a play, staged in 1903, and published the novel in 1905; more than a dozen sequels followed. It is commonly credited with inventing the double life that a century of adventure fiction has lived on since — the idler in public, the rescuer in the dark.

Bibliomancer presents the complete text of the 1905 novel.