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 hideous instrument 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