The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel

The Triumph of the Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
Chapter I
:
"The everlasting stars look down, like glistening eyes bright with
immortal pity, over the lot of man"
1
Nearly five years have gone by!
Five years, since the charred ruins of grim Bastille - stone image of
Absolutism and of Autocracy - set the seal of victory upon the
expression of a people's will and marked the beginning of that
marvellous era of Liberty and of Fraternity which has led us step by
step from the dethronement of a King, through the martryrdom of
countless innocents, to the tyranny of an oligarchy more arbitrary, more
relentless, above all more cruel, than any that the dictators of Rome or
Stamboul ever dream of in their wildest thirst for power. An era that
sees a populace always clamouring for the Millennium, which ranting
demagogues have never ceased to promise: a Millennium to be
achieved alternatively through the extermination of Aristocracy, of
Titles, of Riches, and the abrogation of Priesthood: through dethroned
royalty and desecrated altars, through an army without leadership, or an
Assembly without power.
They have never ceased to prate, these frothy rhetoricians! And the
people went on, vaguely believing that one day, soon, that Millennium
would surely come, after seas of blood had purged the soil of France
from the last vestige of bygone oppression, and after her sons and
daughters had been massacred in their thousands and their tens of

thousands, until their headless bodies had built up a veritable scaling
ladder for the tottering feet of lustful climbers, and these in their turn
had perished to make way for other ranters, other speech-makers, a new
Demosthenes or long-tongued Cicero.
Inevitably these too perished, one by one, irrespective of their virtues or
their vices, their errors or their ideals: Vergniaud, the enthusiast, and
Desmoulins, the irresponsible; Barnave, the just, and Chaumette, the
blasphemer; Hébert, the carrion, and Danton, the power. All, all have
perished, one after the other: victims of their greed and of their crimes -
they and their adherents and their enemies. They slew and were slain in
their turn. They struck blindly, like raging beasts, most of them for fear
lest they too should be struck by beasts more furious than they. All
have perished; but not before their iniquities have for ever sullied what
might have been the most glorious page in the history of France - her
fight for Liberty. Because of these monsters - and of a truth there were
only a few - the fight, itself sublime in its ideals, noble in its conception,
has become abhorrent to the rest of mankind.
But they, arraigned at the bar of history, what have they to say, what to
show as evidence of their patriotism, of the purity of their intentions?
On this day of April, 1794, year II of the New Calendar, eight thousand
men, women, and not a few children, are crowding the prisons of Paris
to overflowing. Four thousand heads have fallen under the guillotine in
the past three months. All the great names of France, her noblesse, her
magistracy, her clergy, members of past Parliaments, shining lights in
the sciences, the arts, the Universities, men of substance, poets,
brain-workers, have been torn from their homes, their churches or their
places of refuge, dragged before a travesty of justice, judged,
condemned and slaughtered; not singly, not individually, but in batches
- whole families, complete hierarchies, entire households: one lot for
the crime of being right, another for being nobly born; some because of
their religion, others because of professed free-thought. One man for
devotion to his friend, another for perfidy; one for having spoken,
another for having held his tongue, and another for no crime at all - just
because of his family connexions, his profession, or his ancestry.

For months it had been the innocents; but since then it has also been the
assassins. And the populace, still awaiting the Millennium, clamour for
more victims and for more - for the aristocrat and for the sans-culotte,
and howl with execration impartially at both.
2
But through this mad orgy of murder and of hatred, one man survives,
stands apart indeed, wielding a power which the whole pack of
infuriated wolves thirsting for his blood are too cowardly to challenge.
The Girondists and the Extremists have fallen. Hébert, the idol of the
mob, Danton its hero and its mouthpiece, have been hurled from their
throne, sent to the scaffold along with ci-devant nobles, aristocrats,
royalists and traitors. But this one man remains, calm in the midst of
every storm, absolute in his will, indigent where others have grasped
riches with both hands, adored, almost deified, by a few, dreaded by all,
sphinx-like, invulnerable, sinister - Robespierre!
Robespierre at this time was