The Scarlet Pimpernel

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1905

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-19

Chapters 20-31

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

Removing the Masks that Stifle Love

Marguerite and Percy love each other very much, but circumstances put walls between them. She has caused a nobleman to be executed, while, unbeknownst to her, he has been trying to rescue aristocrats from the French guillotine. Both she and he must fully reveal themselves to each other, or their love will die.

Shortly after they marry, Marguerite tells Percy about her part in the arrest and killing of the Marquis de St Cyr. Pride, however, prevents her from giving all the details, especially that she had meant only to cause distress to the marquis for having her brother beaten and that revolutionary conspirators had tricked her into coming forward for their own lethal purposes. After some months of Percy’s rejection, and her sarcastic reaction to it, she begs him to forgive her, but his pride prevents him from doing so.

At the same time, the French agent Chauvelin forces her to help him discover the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel, or he’ll order her brother executed for treason. She’s caught in a terrible dilemma: No matter how she chooses, one man must die.

Marguerite discovers that Percy is the Scarlet Pimpernel; the resolution of her dilemma takes on a terrible new urgency. Realizing that she and Percy really do love each other and frustrated by their romantic impasse, Marguerite decides she’ll do anything to repair the break, including dying to protect her husband. At the same time, she’ll do whatever she can to protect her brother and his fellow escapee, the Comte de Tournay. Thus, the solution to her moral conundrum is to risk herself to protect the three of them: “All these lives and that of her husband, lay in Marguerite’s hands; these she must save, if human pluck and ingenuity were equal to the task” (106).

At the hut on the French coast where the two men await rescue, Marguerite screams out an alarm. Percy, disguised as cart driver Rosenbaum, hears her cry. He knows at once that she’s putting her life on the line to help him. He lets the French soldiers beat him and leave him behind so that he can bring her to safety, then removes his disguise and admits, “[…] had I but known what a noble heart yours was, my Margot, I should have trusted you, as you deserved to be trusted […]” (172).

Thus, her desperately risky act rekindles the trust between them, and the love lately doused by mutual suspicion flares once again to life, fueled by their honesty toward each other.

Saving Lives for the Hell of It

The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel thrives on the thrill and adventure of rescuing innocent French aristocrats. To the young men involved, this is the principal attraction of the project; for their leader, it also represents a serious moral crusade, one so important that it nearly scuttles his marriage. Only by accepting an additional ethical duty to his wife can Percy restore the love he shares with her and save the men he has promised to liberate.

Sir Andrew and Lord Antony, two young and daring members of the League, enjoy the dangers of their good works in France. Saved by the League, the Comtesse de Tournay asks why its volunteers take such risks for foreigners, and Lord Antony replies, “Sport, Madame la Comtesse, sport.” She suggests that more noble motives must be at work, but Antony says that “this is the finest sport I have yet encountered.—Hair-breath escapes...the devil’s own risks!—Tally ho!—and away we go!” (22)

The comtesse is correct, but the deeper purpose lies elsewhere, with Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel himself. He gathers young, highborn men whose love of a challenge draws them to his cause. Though inspired in part by the thrill of the chase, his dedication to that task also has a deeper purpose concerned with righting the wrongs committed abroad by a revolutionary government whose dedication to revenge knows no limit.

This overriding concern drives a wedge between Percy and his bride, Marguerite, when he learns of her part in the execution of a marquis. Stunned by her confession, he turns away from her; this, alone, is proof of his deep commitment to a cause that may require daring but needs a higher purpose. He also sacrifices his reputation by playing the public fool so that no one will suspect he’s the Pimpernel himself, architect of the clever rescues of French innocents.

Nevertheless, Percy’s sense of adventure, combined with a dollop of humor and a touch of mischief, keeps him in good spirits, and they do help the cause if only to rattle the enemy's nerves. The Pimpernel’s famous handwritten notes—which appear mysteriously in the pockets of the worst scoundrels of the French Committee of Public Safety and announce yet another foiling of their murderous plans against innocent nobles—give courage to those awaiting rescue, inspire League members to greater efforts, and frustrate and discourage the Committee and its chief villain, Chauvelin.

By tricking Chauvelin into sneezing uncontrollably, Percy’s clever escape discredits the top French agent’s abilities. The Pimpernel’s ironic Jewish disguise, which takes advantage of ugly French social biases to keep Chauvelin at a distance so that he doesn’t inspect the man too closely, does much to discredit the moral underpinnings of the Committee. One step ahead of Chauvelin at all times, Percy evacuates those he has promised to rescue while pretending he’s elsewhere. These clever deeds will become stories passed around enthusiastically by League members, which will help further energize the resistance against the Reign of Terror.

When Marguerite displays her willingness to risk everything to save him, Percy realizes she’s not at all the morally vapid, cruelly selfish person he believed, any more than he is the mentally limited fop that she took him to be. He atones for his misunderstanding by taking a ferocious beating from French soldiers who then abandon him, which frees him to rescue Marguerite.

Resolutely cheerful to the end, Percy displays the élan of an adventure-loving crusader who experiences not only thrills but a virtuous victory, a change in attitude, and a romantic reunion with his wife.

“The Quality” versus the French Peasantry

The chief conflict underlying the story is between the peasants and nobles of France in 1792. The peasants have overthrown the nobility; they consider all upper-class French people as criminals: “Every aristocrat was a traitor” (2) and should be executed. The author’s purpose is to show that high-class people aren’t monsters but refined, civilized persons with many virtues who deserve not execution but admiration. She describes the beleaguered nobility, along with the English aristocrats who rescue them, as the good side, while the French peasants and their leaders are the bad side.

Three times in the book, the author mentions “the quality,” referring to upper-class people, especially the nobility. Orczy, herself a member of an aristocratic family, is conscious of the social distinction between nobles and commoners, a difference unquestioned in late-1700s Europe. She proposes that it’s a distinction with a difference: The nobles really are high-quality people.

Most of the main characters are nobles. Invariably, they’re polite, well dressed, and appreciate fine music, dance, and singing. Their parties are elegant and imaginative. They go to great lengths to do kindnesses to one another. Generally, they are, in fact, nice people.

Marguerite, born into the French lower classes, by her own efforts becomes a celebrity in both the entertainment and intellectual worlds of Paris; she enters the English nobility when she marries the baronet Percy Blakeney and becomes Lady Blakeney. Thus, in the author’s world, quality rises to join those at the top.

In England, commoners such as Jellyband, his daughter Sally, and Marguerite’s maid Louise are described as good, hard-working people. By contrast, French peasants generally are dour, dirty, morally depraved, and bloodthirsty: “the crowd had seen a hundred noble heads fall beneath the guillotine today, [and] it wanted to make sure that it would see another hundred fall on the morrow” (3). The revolution makes every peasant an equal to the nobles; they are all referred to as “citoyen” or “citoyenne,” for citizen. The author will have none of that; she presents nearly all the revolutionaries, including Citoyen Chauvelin, as surly at best and monstrous at worst.

Every person saved by the Scarlet Pimpernel is an innocent from the upper classes of France. One, though, is a commoner: Armand, the brother of Marguerite and secretly a saboteur of the excesses of the French revolution. On the other hand, the Marquis de St Cyr, the only nobleman guilty of a vicious crime, ordered the severe beating of Armand for the sin of pitching woo to the marquis’ daughter. He’s also the aristocrat whom Marguerite singles out for prosecution. That he doesn’t deserve execution is why both Percy and Marguerite lament his death.

The Scarlet Pimpernel vanquishes the French executioners and saves dozens of nobles from a ghastly fate. Though sympathetic to the French republican cause, both Marguerite and Armand deplore the bloody Reign of Terror and do their part to minimize it. The book thus makes clear the author’s position that aristocracy is worth saving and that its destroyers are evil.