The Real Scarlet Pimpernel
“That demned elusive Pimpernel”
―
Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel.
**** SPOILER ALERT!!! **** If you have not already read The Scarlet Pimpernel, you should read it BEFORE your read this blog post. Also please be aware that although TSP is a landmark book in many ways, there are unfortunate prejudices expressed by some characters within the text which are not shared by my or by you. That said:
Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, born in 1905, is arguably the first Underdog, or, if you prefer, the first Zorro, Shadow, Phantom, Batman, or Superman. He is the original mild mannered fop with a secret killer identity. In this case, the fop is named Sir Percy Blakeney, obsessed solely with clothes by day, but by night, a formidable eighteenth century swordsman who can simultaneously save large numbers of people at opposite ends of France, while drinking a nice glass of smuggled Burgandy in a pub in England.
“They seek him here, they seek him there / Those Frenchies seek him everywhere / Is he in heaven or is he in hell? /
That demned elusive Pimpernel” the Baroness writes, excitedly. The Pimpernel (named for a calling card he leaves behind him engraved with a red flower) is not just a master of disguise, but also a genius at establishing multiple competing alibis for points in time when they are needed.
But where did Baroness Orczy get the idea for her very original Scarlet Pimpernel in the first place? The answer to that question is quite a bit less elusive than the Baroness would have liked us to think, although tracking down his full story is a significant and strenuous tour de force.
Photo credit: amazon.com
Elizabeth Sparrow’s very densely written book, Phantom of the Guillotine (2013) describes, as the subtitle lays out, “The Real Scarlet Pimpernel: Louis Bayard - Lewis Duval, 1769-1844.” Sparrow needs no more than her first two pages to dispatch the myth that Orczy invented her amazing hero and his exploits out of whole cloth. Sparrow documents briskly that the Baroness, who was always very cagey on the topic of where she got her ideas, likely heard about and wrote down stories about an actual French spy from the revolutionary period who had already been written about by Alexandre Dumas (of Three Musketeers fame), and about whom documentary evidence Orczy likely accessed in Paris when she visited that city in 1900 for the World Exposition.
Swallow does not even take time to gloat when she establishes by page three that Orczy was more of a transcriber than an inventor of her hero, even down to the small, telling, details of her stories (cardboard tokens with flowers on them) which were used by an actual spy to communicate with the rest of his actual spy league. At the time she wrote the original Pimpernel play (which came before the novel), Orczy had never written professionally, Swallow observes, and yet in only five weeks, the Baroness managed to “invent” detailed exploits for a character who launched a century’s worth of full-fledged super heroes.
The phrase “you can’t make this stuff up” was never more relevant.
The fiction that the Pimpernel was mostly fictional dispatched, Swallow spends the remaining 246 pages of the book laying out an extraordinary account of Bayard’s hidden impact on French and English history in the revolutionary period when France was at war with most of Europe. Bayard (alias Duval) was not as uniformly effective as his fictional counterpart, but tracing what he was and was not able to do within the constraints of the fast-moving French revolutionary political environment makes for a thumping good read.
Sparrow argues convincingly that Louis Bayard was able to establish multiple alibis in France, at will, because he was one of four similar-looking brothers, who coordinated their outfits and acted on synchronized calendars, if not watches. With help from these doppelgangers, Duval was a master of being seen and written about simultaneously at multiple places in France, while conducting his real business somewhere completely different. To choose just one busy year, 1795, Duval crossed the Alps to visit the exiled King Louis XVIII in Italy, and crossed France to deliver the French Princess Royal safely to Vienna (she was the sole child of the guillotined monarchs Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who is known for certain to have survived). In the middle of that same year, Sparrow argues convincingly, Bayard even zipped across the English Channel to visit London, so he could take the English bar exam as his alter ego, Lewis Duval. This, apparently, he passed on his first try, despite his very limited mastery of the English language, because the entire exam was conducted in Latin. Why go to the trouble? Our hero wanted to establish a solid English identity, complete with an address at Temple Bar, so he could always parachute out of his French identity and land in a role he had already been playing. This, in fact, he did, in the 1820s, permanently retiring the Bayard name.
The Phantom of the Guillotine is not a light read, by any means, and Sparrow assumes the reader is on at least a last-name basis with every major and even some minor players over a decade of fast-changing French revolutionary government and anti-government plotting, which makes sometimes for rough going. Google is an indispensable reading companion, sometimes with its friend, Google translate, for those of us not fluent in French. But the story Swallow has pieced together for this book is absolutely amazing. The work is a must-read for anyone interested in actual eighteenth century espionage exploits.
Photo in the public domain.
