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    The Scarlet Pimpernel
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    The Scarlet Pimpernel
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    The Scarlet Pimpernel
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Scarlet Pimpernel

    Written by Baroness Orczy

    Narrated by David Thorn

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    A thrilling tale of mystery and suspense set during the French Revolution, where a dashing English aristocrat risks his life to enter France and save innocents from the guillotine. Baroness Orczy's marvelously romantic tale of an English bonvivant, Sir Percy Blakeney, and his secretive plots to secure the escape of beleaguered French aristocrats from the clutches of "Madame la Guillotine".

    The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is a secret society of English aristocrats who are determined to rescue their French counterparts from execution. Their leader is the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel, whose name comes from the drawing of a red flower he uses to sign his messages.

    Table of Contents:
    Chapter I - Paris: September, 1792
    Chapter II - Dover: "The Fisherman's Rest"
    Chapter III - The Refugees
    Chapter IV - The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel
    Chapter V - Marguerite
    Chapter VI - An Exquisite of '92
    Chapter VII - The Secret Orchard
    Chapter VIII - The Accredited Agent
    Chapter IX - The Outrage
    Chapter X - In the Opera Box
    Chapter XI - Lord Grenville's Ball
    Chapter XII - The Scrap of Paper
    Chapter XIII - Either--Or?
    Chapter XIV - One O'Clock Precisely!
    Chapter XV - Doubt
    Chapter XVI - Richmond
    Chapter XVII - Farewell
    Chapter XVIII - The Mysterious Device
    Chapter XIX - The Scarlet Pimpernel
    Chapter XX - The Friend
    Chapter XXI - Suspense
    Chapter XXII - Calais
    Chapter XXIII - Hope
    Chapter XXIV - The Death-Trap
    Chapter XXV - The Eagle and the Fox
    Chapter XXVI - The Jew
    Chapter XXVII - On the Track
    Chapter XXVIII - The Pere Blanchard's Hut
    Chapter XXIX - Trapped
    Chapter XXX - The Schooner
    Chapter XXXI - The Escape
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlcazar Audio Works
    Release dateJan 1, 2009
    ISBN9780981538082
    Author

    Baroness Orczy

    Baroness Emma Orczy was born in Hungary in 1865, the daughter of the composer Baron Félix Orczy de Orci. The Orczy family, fearing a peasant revolution, left their country estate for Budapest in 1868 and settled in London in 1880. There Emma attended art school and met her future husband, a clergyman’s son, Montague MacLean Barstow. Following the birth of their only child, she began writing historical novels and plays to supplement his low income. The Scarlet Pimpernel was her first play (and third novel) and proved an enormous success in both mediums. Orczy went on to pen over a dozen sequels, as well as many other novels. She died in Oxfordshire in 1947.

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    Reviews for The Scarlet Pimpernel

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      A classic, and for a good reason.The Scarlet Pimpernel is a daring tale set during the French Revolution. A mysterious Englishman, known only as the Scarlet Pimpernel, is devoted to rescuing those that the revolutionaries have condemned to the guillotine. A ruthless French agent is just as determined to find the Scarlet Pimpernel and send him to his execution. And it all hinges on the actions of one woman...Oh what fun! A smashing good read!Experiments in Reading
    • 4/5
      Defined at its most basic level, a superhero is a vigilante with a secret identity and a gimmick that sets them apart from ordinary vigilantes. Hungarian-born British playwright Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci’s The Scarlet Pimpernel features as its titular main character a British aristocrat who uses disguises to conceal his identity as he aids nobles in their escape from the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, signing his notes to his accomplices and his taunts to the French authorities with a scarlet pimpernel flower (Anagallis arvensis). Baroness Orczy based this 1905 novel on her original 1903 play, with her superhero predating Johnston McCulley’s Zorro by 14 years and Walter B. Gibson’s The Shadow by at least 25 years (depending on if one begins with the play or novel and counts The Shadow’s first radio appearance or the first magazine story), though the first superheroes as most know them wouldn’t appear until 1938 and ’39 with Superman and the Batman, respectively. Baroness Orci published five further novels and one short story collection before the appearance of Zorro in 1919, an additional four novels and short story collection before the appearance of The Shadow, and three more novels before the first appearance of Superman, with her final Scarlet Pimpernel novel, Mam’zelle Guillotine, appearing in 1940. In total, Baroness Orczy’s superhero appears in eleven novels and two short story collections, with the series also including two novels about his ancestor and one about his descendant.The basic plot revolves around Sir Percy Blakeney, a baronet who uses the guise of the Scarlet Pimpernel to rescue French aristocrats. Like the Batman years later, Sir Percy Blakeney acts “the lazy nincompoop, the effete fop, whose life seemed spent in card and supper rooms” so as to throw off those who would discover the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel (pg. 128). Madame Orczy describes Sir Blakeney’s mansion in terms that similarly recall Wayne Manor, all of it a further part of his disguise as a vain aristocrat (pg. 129). Citizen Chauvelin pursues the Pimpernel on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, seeking to discover his identity and prevent him aiding aristocrats in their escape. Meanwhile, Marguerite Blakeney, the wife of Sir Percy, stumbles across and inadvertently reveals his identity after Chauvelin’s attempts to blackmail her by threatening her brother, Armand St. Just, who still resides in France and is threatened by the republican forces currently orchestrating the Reign of Terror. In many way, the various aristocrats’ discussion of the Scarlet Pimpernel coupled with the misunderstandings between Marguerite and others reflect some of the drawing room farces popular only a decade prior to the novel’s publication in the Victorian era. Like any proper superhero story, the Pimpernel’s adventures continued as Baroness Orczy published a sequel, I Will Repay, one year later in 1906. The third act does have some alarming ethnic stereotypes reflective of the period in which Baroness Orczy wrote, but the rest is entertaining and the work itself is worthy of study for its place in genre fiction. This edition, part of ImPress’s “The Best Mysteries of All Time” series, reprints the original 1905 text in its entirety with a red leather cover. It makes a lovely gift edition for fans of the original work or book collectors looking to add to their shelves.
    • 1/5
      I have no idea why some people classify this novel as a classic piece of literature. Just because it was written over a hundred years ago doesn't automatically make it a great novel. Orczy is not in the same league as Tolstoy or Dickens or Shakespeare. She did not write a number of brilliant works that hold up to the passage of time and remain relevant. She did, I think, write the first superhero novel. I read that the creators of Batman were influenced by The Scarlet Pimpernel and I totally see that. At times I felt like I was reading the pulpy novelization of an action movie. I'm sure at the time of the release of this book (and the accompanying play) the plot seemed fresh and daring. Now, of course, it's just one long cliche and common trope. The comparisons to a Scooby Doo episode are not far off the mark.The plot is extremely far-fetched and the characters one dimensional. I kept waiting for a supernatural element to be introduced in order to explain the disguises the S.P. used. I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough - there is no way he could turn himself into a petite elderly woman. Just....no. He's supposed to be huge. How does he hide his height and girth? Hmmmm. And Marguerite -the cleverest woman in Europe! - spends hours with him while he is disguised and doesn't notice? Hmmm. The S.P.'s superhuman strength is also over the top. He is beaten so severely he loses consciousness yet he is still able to walk a mile and a half in the pitch dark through the rough countryside carrying Marguerite? Hmmmm. Orczy is a mediocre writer. If I read the word "inane" one more time I was going to scream. Were thesauruses not invented when she wrote the book? She tells the reader, she doesn't show the reader. Don't tell me Marguerite is "the most clever woman in Europe" over & over & over. Show me! Instead, Marguerite is incredibly dense throughout the book. I couldn't get over how she kept forgetting people - forgetting her husband, forgetting her brother, forgetting that guy that helped her get to France. Where was the cleverness? The romance between Marguerite and her husband befuddled me. They got secretly married after a whirlwind courtship because he was sexually attracted to her and she really enjoyed how much he desired her. She didn't love him but loved that he loved/wanted her so much. Then, after the marriage, they almost immediately have a falling out and never talk about it because both are too proud. Marguerite suddenly decides she passionately loves her husband because.....um, that wasn't totally clear to me. Because she found out he was secretly the S.P.? Or something like that.Finally, that crazy antisemitic chapter of the book "The Jew" - what the hell!?!? That came out of no where. It was like talking to someone at a party, thinking they are cool, when suddenly they start talking about n*ggers and f*ggots. Whoa! Didn't realize how horrible you were! Thanks for sharing that tidbit about yourself! It wasn't just that Orczy was showing some of her characters to be bigoted towards Jewish people. She, the third person narrator, was writing these horrid descriptions."His red hair, which he wore after the fashion of the Polish Jews, with the corkscrew curls each side of his face, was plentifully sprinkled with grey- a general coating of grime, about his cheeks and chin, gave him a peculiarly dirty and loathsome appearance. He had the habitual stoop, those of his race affected in mock humility in past centuries, before the dawn of equality and freedom in matters of faith, and he walked behind Desgas with the peculiar shuffling gait which has remained the characteristic of the Jew trader in continental Europe to this day.""She felt as if he held Percy's fate in his long, dirty hands.""The eyes of the Jew shot a quick, keen glance at the gold in his interlocutor's hand.""With a final, most abject and cringing bow, the old Jew shuffled out of the room."Talk about a buzz kill. I was already having issues with the book and that chapter was like the final nail in the coffin. I give the book 2 stars because it does have a historical interest in the sense that Orczy created a Batman/Superman sort of hero and that is intriguing. Also, I am a sucker for books set in that time period. Even mediocre books like this one.
    • 3/5
      Great history, from both the classic sense of history and also in the sense of history of plotting in a mystery. The historical landscape is carefully described. It is also counterintuitive in terms of underdog/favorite dynamics. And the plotting itself is very clever, particularly so when you place it early on the development of mystery plotting. The chapters are short so it is also easy to pick up and set down.
    • 3/5
      Justly famous for it's theatrical style, outrageous intrigue and less-than-2-percent-body-fat plot. I enjoyed it despite the florid writing and simplistic, one-sided view of historic events. Still, I must say, if the French secret police were really this dense, I too could have duped them as often and with equal panache.
    • 5/5
      WOW!! This book was amazing! A classic and a must read! I am not going to write a real review because it would be all spoilers anyway, so just know that you should read this! Some parts were hard from me to get through (lotttts of description!) but I am glad I kept at it, and in the end, this is now one of my favorite classics!
    • 4/5
      Well, this was really fun. The unknown man known as the Scarlet Pimpernel is a master of disguise. His creative plots to save members of the nobility from the French revolutionaries were tremendously entertaining. I was pleasantly surprised by this book. The narration by Ralph Cosham of the audio book was very good.
    • 5/5
      Lady Blakeney is a bit of a disappointment, considering she was written by a woman. However, the story being told through her point of view is a very interesting device. They are the proto-couple for Nick and Nora Charles (of the movies). Sir Percy himself is fantastic, and despite the slow-start to the book, the writing is exciting and story very captivating.
    • 4/5
      A fun adventurous romp. A bit repetitive near the end but a thoroughly enjoyable read. Love the effusive language, so fun and often pompous. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      A classic worth re-reading! It has everything: adventure, romance, intrigue, history, humour and a happy ending! What more could you ask?
    • 5/5
      Action-packed! Old-fashioned spy story...
    • 4/5
      That was good fun.
    • 4/5
      I read this many year ago and it was a favorite back then. It's still excellent - although I can tell my tastes have changed over time. I don't remember it being quite so - sappy. But then, I think I read it during a sappy time. My favorite trivia about this book is it is generally considered to be one of the main sources of inspiration for Batman/Bruce Wayne. And considering how clever Blakeney is, one has no trouble believing that. With humor, love, adventure, and much daring-do, this is an fine read, perfect for rainy days on couch or sunny beaches by the water. Highly recommend, particularly if you enjoy light literature or need a break.
    • 5/5
      I was first exposed to The Scarlet Pimpernel by my ninth grade English teacher whose approach to teaching ninth grade English seems to have been getting literature down the throats of teenagers by any means necessary. More often than not, this meant showing us the movie version of novels rather than actually requiring us to read them. One spring day, we watched the 1982 version of The Scarlett Pimpernel with Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour.

      I was smitten.

      Shortly thereafter, I found a used copy for sell at my local public library and for just $0.25 the world of Sir Percy Blakeney and Marguerite Blakeney was mine! I devoured it.

      Twice smitten.

      The Scarlet Pimpernel is a cat and mouse tale of an English nobleman who is hell-bent on saving his French counterparts from the bloody blade of the guillotine during the French Revolution. He has the annoying habit of leaving the symbol of red flower (a scarlet pimpernel, get it?) behind as a calling card and this has made everyone curious about his identity. The English have put him on a pedestal; the French have put a price on his head.

      The book is filled with adventure, near-misses, secret identities, lies, espionage, shocking revelations, an arch-nemesis, and things that could/would never happen in real life, forcing you to suspend disbelief (just a tad). But that's why we read fiction, isn't it? I know there are a myriad of other reasons we read fiction, but sometimes it does come down to escapism, pure and simple.

      However, despite all of the high drama, danger and excitement, there is a part of me that sees The Scarlett Pimpernel simply as a love story. Not as a simple love story; maybe, and perhaps more accurately, a love triangle along the lines of the Clark Kent-Lois Lane-Superman love triangle.

      Marguerite is married to Sir Percy, but she is in love with the idea of another whose initials also are S.P. (hum...) Sir Percy seemed like a decent guy when she agreed to marry him but alas, now he seems doltish, and what's even worse, he seems quite indifferent to her. Sir Percy and Marguerite's marriage is in crisis. True, it's not as big a crisis as the French Revolution, but Baroness Orczy has skillfully juxtaposed one against the other. As the drama of the revolution plays out in the background and the world (well, France) falls apart, we can quietly explore the anatomy of a failing marriage (and possibly contemplate such questions as: How well can you really know the person closest to you? Do you only know what he/she chooses to reveal to you? Could you forgive the ultimate betrayal? Could those glasses really fool Lois Lane? Really?!)

      In the end, The Scarlett Pimpernel is a sweet and tender tale that proves you can never hide your true essence from the one who loves you best.

      Plus, it's about a hero. We can never have too many heroes. The Scarlet Pimpernel is one for the ages.



    • 5/5
      One of my favorite all-time classics.
    • 4/5
      I LOVE this story!! I have read every version and adaptation, even the graphic novel!! I have also seen pretty much every version on film! The espionage, the duplicity, the tension, and drama are fantastic! Not to mention that the Scarlet Pimpernel is just the greatest pre-super hero, hero EVER!!!!
    • 5/5
      I love this story first as a book, then in the many movie versions and also as a musical. While the Anthony Andrews is the version I love best, the old Leslie Howard version caught my heart and he actually kissed the ground she walked on and it did't look cheesy.
    • 5/5
      An underrated classic. A definite must read for young adults especially.
    • 4/5
      One of the better romance/adventures. The book is more Marguerite's story than the Scarlet Pimpernel's, unlike every stage and screen adaptation (so far as I'm aware). It leans towards melodrama at moments- to be expected of a book that follows the Tale of Two Cities version of the French Revolution, with numbers of executions happening daily in 1792 which weren't reached except for the worst parts of 1794- but the original duel identity hero who has influenced everything from Zorro to Batman holds his own in the test of time.
    • 5/5
      I was familiar with the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel thanks to a junior high French class where instead of learning French we watched The Scarlet Pimpernel staring Jane Seymour every class period. Good thing we all thoroughly enjoyed the movie! But as is usually the case, this book was even better. I enjoyed the journey back in time to revolutionary France and how the ingenious spy the Scarlet Pimpernel saved many lives. It was really a fun story!
    • 3/5
      The classic text, but impersonation voices sometimes difficult to understand.
    • 3/5
      The original Scarlet Pimpernel story suffers from having become so well known. Its twists and reversals are utterly unsurprising to the modern reader simply because they have been imitated in every conceivable form of genre fiction since the book's publication. The book itself is not at fault, it does everything you expect from it but, unlike other evergreen genre blockbusters – such as the masterworks of Dumas or the more inventive Beau Geste novels – it has little else to offer.
    • 5/5
      I don't know how or when I learned about this story, but I've known the basic plot for a long time. It's never been part of my reading plans because I thought it just wasn't for me, that it would be just a silly melodrama. And yes, it is kind of silly, with Lady Blakeney being so clever, such tiny exquisite hands, so perfectly beautiful. The writing isn't great, with much repetition - the word "merrily" is used often, very often. Despite all this, I loved the book. It's a swashbuckling adventure story, a romance. It has a fabulously brave, clever, handsome hero, and of course the aforementioned beauty of Lady Blakeney. All this and a setting of the French Revolution as a bonus. Excellent!
    • 4/5
      I read this as part of a monthly challenge in one of the groups I participate in. The parameters for the challenge being Classics, "read either a Shakespearean play or a classic love story." Amidst high school AP Lit flashbacks of the butcherings of Othello by the average drawling teen, I set out on the latter.

      'Odd's Fish!' I ended up really liking this quick read more than I thought I might. It's adventurous, fun, and it all ties up nicely in the end according to the majority of the wants and whims of the time's reading set.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the audio book, narrated by Mary Sarah. Audio books can be tricky, because loving it often depends on how good the narrator is. I thought that Mary Sarah was a great narrator and she added to the experience of the book.

      The Scarlet Pimpernel started off a little slowly to give readers an idea of setting and main characters. After these are established it's a page turner. I almost stopped the audio so that I could read the story myself, it pulled me in.

      As always, leaves me wanting more of the story, more of Marguerite and Percy and just more of this unassuming hero, using the prejudices of his society to save the innocent.
    • 3/5
      A true classic for those who wish to experience the progenitor of the costumed adventurer.
    • 4/5
      This is such a cheesy, sentimental book, and yet I'm always drawn in to the Pimpernel's adventures.
    • 4/5
      Loved it, as usual. This is a comfort book - well worn, familiar, and great. I don't know how many times I've read it, but it has to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 over the years.
    • 5/5
      Oh what a lovely book. Don't let the historical setup fool you- it's basically a good old fashioned melodrama with a few thriller moments thrown in. I saw the old black-and-white movie a while ago, and while entertaining, it does not do justice to the story and the characters. It's truly a "big R" Romantic novel- larger than life heroes and villains, life-and-death choices, tragedy, humor and a few distinct love stories all blended together in a tightly written plot. Do yourself a favor- take a break from modern fast paced, world-weary fiction and spend some time with the characters and the world of Scarlet Pimpernel. You'd be surprised at how enjoyable the experience will be.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful book. I wished it covered more of the Reign of Terror but it was a light-hearted read.