Baroness Emmuska Orczy. The Laughing Cavalier. 1914 Edited by Brenda Lewis et al, Project Gutenberg, 14 May 2012.
———. The First Sir Percy. 1920. Project Gutenberg Australia, May 2020.
———. El Dorado: An Adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel. 1913. Edited by David Widger et al. Project Gutenberg, 15 Feb. 2018.

Lately it seems we have been reading a number of serious books. Even the recent fiction book we reviewed dealt with serious issues in a literary manner. It was time to just have some fun. We decided to read some more Scarlet Pimpernel stories. They are clever, swashbuckling, and escapist—escapist in more than one sense.

Some readers may recognize the title of The Laughing Cavalier. It comes from a famous painting by Dutch Master Frans Hals. Baroness Orczy found the character in the painting attractive and imagines him as an ancestor of her Scarlet Pimpernel. So, yes, he is fun-loving and sees the joy even in difficult circumstances. He is also a skillful swordsman and a “soldier of fortune.”

There are certainly echoes of The Three Musketeers with the intrigue and almost humorous tone—not to mention the names. Our cavalier, a personal friend of the painter Hals, hangs around with two other men. All three appear lower class but have certain military skills. They call themselves the philosophers: Socrates, Pythagoras, and Diogenes. The laughing cavalier is Diogenes and is clearly the ringleader.

Students of American history may recall that the Plymouth Pilgrims wanted to emigrate from Holland where they had been living because a twelve-year truce with Spain was coming to an end in 1621, and they feared war and perhaps conquest. We know from history that the Netherlands had become independent of Spain in the early 1600s but the Spanish began an attempt to reconquer the various city-states in 1621 when the truce expired. This invasion is the backdrop to this story and the next one.

The most effective leader of the Dutch independence movement was Maurice of Nassau of the House of Orange. In the novel, a noble family of Haarlem (Hals’ hometown) are the Beresteyns. Lord Beresteyn supports Maurice but his son Nicolaes secretly sides with the Spanish, locally led by an ambitious young noble named Stoutenburg.

Nicolaes, Stoutenburg, and a few other young men meet at night in a quiet church to discuss their plans. They are unaware that Nicolaes’ sister Gilda is in the church quietly praying until they are ready to leave and realize that she has overheard their plans. Should she tell her father to warn Prince Maurice or keep quiet to shield her brother? It is further complicated because the beautiful Gilda had been engaged to Stoutenburg until he broke the engagement to marry the daughter of a wealthier lord.

Stoutenburg, the ringleader, has a plan to take care of this problem. As he and his young allies are gathering an army together, they will hire some mercenaries to temporarily kidnap Gilda to keep her away from her father or Statholder Maurice and to keep her from getting into trouble. They hire the three philosophers who are happy to be hired because they are running low of money. They only know that they are to take Gilda to Rotterdam where a business associate will take her into temporary custody. One reason they are running low on funds is that Diogenes is generous to those worse off than he is.

Lots of money, power, and a fair young maiden make for an amusing read. We meet a few historical characters along the way including Frans Hals. We are even told that he has painted a portrait of young Gilda. There is a painting of an Emerantia van Beresteyn from 1634 that used to be attributed to Hals. There also was a Haarlem painter named Nicolaes Beresteyn. Even though we do not know the name of the Laughing Cavalier, we can picture him smiling in the studio and laughing all the way to Rotterdam and back.

Diogenes becomes the main character in the sequel, The First Sir Percy. It is not giving too much away by saying that though Diogenes considers himself Dutch, his father was actually an English mercenary who married and then abandoned his mother. His birth name, then, is Percy Blakeney, which readers may recognize as the real name of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Of course, the Pimpernel is alive a hundred and seventy years later, so this is his ancestor. And the political situation is a little different here. Holland is fighting against Spain for its continued independence.

It turns out that Lord Beresteyn has met Diogenes’ father on business trips to England, and approves of Gilda’s marriage to the first Sir Percy. But in typical novelistic and swashbuckling fashion, the double wedding of Diogenes to Gilda and Nicolaes to his fiancée are interrupted. It is not as complicated as Manzoni’s The Betrothed (a.k.a. I Promessi Sposi) or Longfellow’s Evangeline, but treachery and a Spanish invasion are involved.

Here we see Diogenes’ talent for creating a misleading scenario, one that his descendant will make famous. We cannot say that Baroness Orczy is recycling a plot here, but we can say that the apple does not fall far from the family tree. Alas, the same cannot be said for Nicolaes who continues to be tempted by Stoutenburg’s promise of wealth and power.

In both novels, how do we reconcile Gilda’s love for her only brother with the respect she has for her father and Prince Maurice? Let us just say that Diogenes is not only clever, but wise, like a true philosopher.

El Dorado is another tale of the actual Scarlet Pimpernel, not an ancestor. At this point in January 1794, the Reign of Terror seems like a permanent institution. The King and Queen have been beheaded, and now both royalists and republicans are concerned about the young prince. He has been imprisoned for two years and is still not even ten years old. Can he be rescued? Should the Republic simply execute him to get rid of a potential problem? Will the Scarlet Pimpernel have his say in this matter?

It gets very complicated.

First of all, one of the leaders of the Committee on General Security, Chauvelin, used to be ambassador to England. He has figured out that the Scarlet Pimpernel is Sir Percy. Since Sir Percy is not a Frenchman, he has to be slightly more careful about accusing him without evidence. Sir Percy is married to the former Marguerite St. Just.

Even someone with just a cursory knowledge of that family name knows that St. Just was the name of one of the leaders of the Terror. Marguerite is, in fact, a cousin of the Jacobin Antoine St. Just. Now her brother Armand is still in France and has generally been left alone because of his name. However, he has fallen for an actress at the Comédie Française, and Chauvelin and the brutal Heron see an opportunity to trap the Scarlet Pimpernel since Armand St. Just is his brother-in-law.

Just as Chauvelin is very loosely based on a real historical figure, so is Armond’s love. “Mademoiselle Lange” was indeed a very beautiful actress from the time period. The author tells us that the Carnavalet Museum has a dozen of sketches of her by David. Well, the Musée Carnavalet does have twelve sketches of her: eleven are anonymous portraits, and one is a sketch for a painting. That painting was done by A. Louis Girodet-Troison, who apparently had done two or three paintings of her, two nudes from the classics as Danae and Venus and one straightforward portrait that is said by some to be of her. Girodet often worked at Jacques-Louis David’s studio, so the paintings may have been wrongly attributed to him by Baroness Orczy.

It so happens that the historical Mlle. Lange was briefly arrested by French authorities because they objected to a play she was starring in. She was released after some time in jail. That little episode may have inspired Orcczy as well. Coincidentally, her name in French (L’Ange) means “angel.”

The pièce de résistance of El Dorado is the daring escape of Louis XVII, the nine-year-old heir to the throne. Again, Orczy has done her historical research along with some speculation. A couple by the name of Simon had been custodians of the prince in his jail cell until January 1794. That is when he is alleged to have escaped. Historically, he was moved to a different prison where he would die a year later. There were many rumors that he had escaped and a homeless boy of the same age and similar looks replaced him. As with Tsarina Anastasia in the twentieth century, there were a number of men in the nineteenth century who claimed to be the Dauphin.¹

We also meet a Baron de Batz, another historic figure who did help a few French aristocrats escape to Austria. El Dorado presents him as a foil to the Scarlet Pimpernel, the “genuine article” compared to the relative dilettantism of De Batz.

Now that we have all that out of the way, the story itself is pretty tense. Much of it centers around Armand St. Just, Lady Blakeney’s brother. Have you every watched a film or television show where you know one of the characters is getting himself or herself into trouble? That is Armand. He is in love. He thinks he is helping Mlle. Lange. But Chauvelin and Heron are using her to lure him to catch Sir Percy and as many of his League as possible.

It gets quite complicated. It seems impossible that Sir Percy, Lady Percy, Armand, and the Dauphin can possibly extricate themselves, but that “d__d elusive Pimpernel” manages it. This is another entertaining read. Because it involves a later century and escapes, there is less swashbuckling than with the Pimpernel’s ancestor Diogenes, but this is still quite a yarn. In all three we see noble, clever men accompanied by loving and strong women in the middle of adventurous action. That is still a selling point today.

Notes

¹ For what it is worth, the matter may be settled now. As was customary with the French royalty, when the Dauphin died, his heart was removed and placed in a reliquary. That reliquary was smuggled out of France. When examined later, it did indeed contain the heart of a pre-teen. DNA testing done in 1999 did identify it as from a male member of the French royal family, but that was not known in 1920 when the book was written and many suspected that there was some kind of cover-up.

² The novel calls her Jeanne though her name was Anne, but the museum art collections seem to just call her Mademoiselle Lange, so Orczy may have been guessing at her name.