The Scarlet Pimpernel. Baroness Orczy

life, ‘a perfect presentation of an English gentleman.’ It is all the more surprising, then, that his creator should be not only a woman but one born ‘of Hungarian parents and grand-parents and countless generations of Hungarians’, who, when she arrived in England aged fifteen, ‘did not speak one word of English’.

      But Baroness Emma Orczy’s iconic character was not drawn solely from her adopted country. He emerged, very gradually, out of the extraordinary life she was dealt, as she saw it, by the will of God.

      Early Years

      Baroness Emma ‘Emmuska’ Orczy was born in Hungary in 1865, the second of two daughters of Baron Félix Orczy, a composer and amateur musician admired by the great Franz Liszt. In her 1947 memoir, Links in the Chain of Life, she notes that her noble Orczy ancestors are recorded as having arrived in Hungary ‘nearly two hundred years before the Norman Conquest’. Her mother’s side of the family was no less eminent, her grandfather being a count and member of the Hungarian parliament.

      Her early childhood was one of privilege and great happiness; the family lived in a large house in the countryside, often filled with grand parties attended by distinguished acquaintances who were serenaded with lively gypsy music. But when she was just three years old, this idyllic country life came to an abrupt end: their farmland was torched during a violent peasant revolt against industrialisation, and the terror was enough to convince Baron Orczy to move his family to the safety of Budapest.

      Emma, always an optimist, later came to see this dramatic flight from her childhood home as one of the best things that could have happened to her. It threw her father back into his musical career and the whole family into the glittering world of Budapest society. From there they moved through the capitals of Europe: Brussels, Paris and finally London, where they planned to stay only temporarily. For Emma Orczy, however, after fifteen years on the move, the city quickly came to be a permanent home.

      The Search for Inspiration

      The only career open to Orczy, as a nineteenth-century baroness whose father had traditional views of a woman’s place, was one in the arts – but even she knew that she had ‘absolutely no talent’ for music. After ‘dear old Liszt’ winced as he heard her attempt his own piano compositions, it was clear to Orczy that she would need to find her calling elsewhere. In London she enrolled at the West London School of Art and then the Heatherley School of Fine Art, and although some of her pieces were exhibited at the Royal Academy, she once again found that mediocrity stalked her through the art world – ‘mediocrity, again, my bugbear, my nightmare!’

      But it was at Heatherley’s that she met illustrator Montagu Barstow, ‘the man who from that day became and remained all the world to me’. They married in 1894 and in 1899 had their only child, John Montague Orczy-Barstow. They were a blissfully happy family but money was tight, and finally Orczy had a light-bulb moment: she had seen so much of the world, and met so many fascinating people – why not put that life experience to profitable use by writing stories?

      Buoyed by having two of her early stories accepted for publication in literary magazines, Orczy turned her attention to coming up with ‘something big. Something that would spread my name throughout the country, that would make it known and repeated by people who read, people who mattered, people whose opinion I would value.’ On an 1899 visit to Paris with Montagu, she found the French consumed by a fervent anti-English sentiment inspired by the horrors of the Boer War. At the same time the city echoed with tragic tales of noble Parisians who had fallen victim to the Reign of Terror a century earlier. The two threads converged in her mind to form the backdrop to a story; now all she needed was a hero.

      He came to her, somewhat implausibly, on the platform of Temple Underground station in London. Standing there on a cold, foggy day, she suddenly had a mental vision before her of Sir Percy Blakeney: ‘I saw him in his exquisite clothes, his slender hands holding up his spy-glass: I heard his lazy drawling speech, his quaint laugh.’ The whole story fell into place, and within just five weeks in early 1903, Emma Orczy had written The Scarlet Pimpernel.

      ‘Such Happy Fools’

      The Scarlet Pimpernel was not immediately accepted for publication as a novel, so Orczy adapted it into a play, which premiered rather quietly in Nottingham in 1903. In January 1905, however, with the addition of a new act co-written with Montagu, it opened at London’s New Theatre (now the Noël Coward), where it went on to have over two thousand performances. That same year, the novel was published.

      Orczy was almost forty years old by now, but it was her first taste of the limelight and she was delighted. In her memoir she recalls sitting in an Oxford Street tea shop with Montagu and seeing a bus emblazoned with an advertisement for the play; it was going in the wrong direction but nonetheless they jumped aboard ‘and sat happily enthroned behind the magic placard all the way to Tottenham Court Road. ‘Weren’t we fools? But oh, such happy fools.’

      The Scarlet Pimpernel

      Set in 1792 at the height of the Reign of Terror, The Scarlet Pimpernel tells of a mysterious, swashbuckling English agent who rescues French royalists and aristocrats from execution and spirits them away to the safety of England. The only trace of his identity is a bragging note to the Public Prosecutor in Paris bearing a drawing of ‘a little English wayside flower’ – the scarlet pimpernel. All of London rings with a verse poking fun at the humiliation of the French authorities:

      We seek him here, we seek him there,

      Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.

      Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?

      That damned, elusive Pimpernel.

      While the novel delights in ribbing England’s age-old rivals, the French, its casually anti-Semitic presentation of certain Jewish characters, whether or not ‘of its era’, makes for decidedly uneasy reading. The novel’s positive legacy is that it popularised the notion of a disguised hero with a signature weapon and an iconic calling card, aspects of which were later borrowed for the Lone Ranger (who first appeared in 1933), Superman (1938), Batman (1939) and perhaps most memorably Johnston McCulley’s character Zorro (1919). The Pimpernel made Baroness Emma Orczy a literary star and she capitalised on his success, writing a series of prequels and sequels to the original tale. He has appeared on stage and screen countless times, thoroughly refuting the Daily Mail critic who wrote, in 1905, that ‘the Scarlet Pimpernel is a little flower that blossoms and dies in one day, which is the obvious fate of this play’.

      Montagu Barstow died in 1942 at the couple’s Monte Carlo villa. Baroness Emma Orczy died in London in 1947.

       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,