"I Will Repay", Baroness Orczy
2 November 2024 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlode"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord-- I will repay."
This book was billed in various editions as 'Further Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel' and 'A Scarlet Pimpernel Story', but in fact as a sequel to the enormous success of the original Scarlet Pimpernel novel it is a somewhat unexpected choice; the Scarlet Pimpernel himself has little more than a walk-on role, and the main character is an idealistic Citizen Deputy in the National Convention who is denounced to the authorities by a young aristocrat in revenge for events that had occurred before the Revolution. It's a bold development on Orczy's part, if nothing else, and I suspect may have disconcerted the contemporary audience as much as it disconcerted me when I first read it as a child, for in her next book she returns to the old set-up of Sir Percy squaring off against a returning Chauvelin in order to save the captive Marguerite. But this one is quite a departure, and I can appreciate it now more than I did on my original reading. (And my 1950s pulp-fiction edition -- now subtitled "The Fifth Adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel" after the arrival of some earlier 'prequels' -- was on its forty-seventh impression in the forty years since its first publication, so it clearly didn't do too badly...)
I actually got unexpected echoes of Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" at points in this book, perhaps because of the Parisian setting and the role of public opinion and of swaying the mob. The novel opens with what is basically a condemnation of the ancien régime, as Paul Déroulède, a wealthy parvenu barely tolerated among the aristocracy for his money, finds himself compelled to a senseless duel by a social code that considers it bourgeois to apologise, and then forced into resuming the fight and killing his young opponent even after honour has been satisfied. The boy's fourteen-year-old sister Juliette is then obliged by their father to take an oath to destroy Déroulède by any means available, on pain of the eternal torment of her brother's soul if he should remain unavenged -- a threat which at that impressionable age horrifies her.
She takes refuge in a convent, but the Revolution intervenes. With the Archbishop who had promised to absolve her of her vow a casualty of the turmoil, with the religious foundation broken up and the nuns sent to their deaths, with all the previous property of her family confiscated, Juliette, the heiress and last surviving descendant of the Duc de Marny, ends up living on the charity of her old nurse, with nothing to cling to save the memory of her 'sublime mission' of vengeance. After the notorious murder of Marat at the hands of a girl of her own age, she resolves that "Charlotte Corday, the half-educated little provincial, should not put to shame Mademoiselle de Marny, daughter of a hundred dukes, of those who had made France before she took to unmaking herself", and comes up with a scheme to trick her way into Déroulède's house and into his confidence.
Meanwhile 'Citizen Déroulède' has contrived to survive "the most seething time of that most seething revolution" unscathed -- so far. He is no longer wealthy, having "had sufficient prudence to give away in good time that which, undoubtedly, would have been taken away from him later on", and by giving without stint at a time when the people of Paris were in their most desperate need had won the devotion of the mob, however fickle that might prove to be; better yet, he had had the good fortune to be described as "harmless" by Marat before the latter was murdered, and the chance of that murder has cast a subsequent halo of infallibility over the martyred man's pronouncements. He sits as a member of the National Convention, albeit as a member of the moderate Gironde in an era when it is no longer aristocrats but fellow-revolutionaries who are increasingly condemned to the guillotine... and, although Juliette has as yet no idea of this, he just happens to be hatching plans for a rescue of the imprisoned Queen Marie-Antoinette, motivated by precisely the same pity and generosity that has made him the idol of the starving rabble who hate her.
The Queen's case is so hopeless that even the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, which maintains its mystique by never undertaking any task that does not succeed, is not prepared to attempt it, and, as history inexorably informs us, Paul Déroulède does not manage to get very far with his scheme. But when Juliette overhears his intentions, she takes it as a sign that Fate has inexorably appointed her as his executioner, and sends in an anonymous denunciation of the man who has shown her nothing but kindness. It is not until he confesses his love for her -- the love that he has always considered hopeless, because he is a republican and a revolutionary, the enemy of her class, and because he was, however unwillingly, the instrument of her brother's death, even though he has tried to pay for that by helping her -- that it dawns on Juliette that what she feels for him is not hate but love in her turn.
But it is already too late, and all she can do is attempt to sacrifice herself in order to save him and repay the consequences of what she has done, a sacrifice that Déroulède is by his nature unable to allow her to carry through, thus inevitably dooming them both. Enter his old friend the Scarlet Pimpernel as deus ex machina...
I think the reason I disliked this book as a child (besides the disappointingly low Pimpernel content) was that I really didn't care for Juliette; I had no sympathy for her romantic quandaries and would have much preferred to see Déroulède paired off with the unswervingly loyal and resourceful Anne Mie, who gets very much the thin end of the wedge in this story. She is the one person who sees through Juliette's deliberate attempt to endanger herself in order to get Paul Déroulède's ready sympathy, and who not only jumps to the correct conclusion as to the author of the denunciation that devastates their household, but gets the truth out of Juliette using the time-honoured strategem of a piece of blank paper; she tries to enlist Sir Percy Blakeney's help, only to be told that there is nothing he can do ("if, indeed, she turned out to be false, or even treacherous, she would, nevertheless, still hold a place in Déroulède's very soul, which no one else would ever fill"). And the only happiness she gets is the discovery that "hers was the nature born to abnegation... and destined to find bliss therein"; it is enough, in the end, for her to be forgiven for hurting the man she loves by revealing to him Juliette's betrayal. Anne Mie is doomed to play the role of Eponine: she has loved him unswervingly all her life, but received only pity and chivalrous friendship in return ("what a life I might have known... but he never saw me there").
I have more sympathy for Juliette now -- and more tolerance for romance in my fiction! Despite the tumultuous events she has lived through, she is extremely sheltered and immature; indeed, emotionally she has barely grown up since the traumatic night when her brother's body was brought home. (If you work it out, she is almost the same age as Marguerite Blakeney, but where Marguerite, likewise orphaned at a young age, earned her own living and held court among brilliant and witty admirers from the age of eighteen, Juliette has been protected and supported by others her whole life, even if that only amounts to sharing the meagre savings of her old nurse in the refuge of an obscure garret. Marguerite is all woman; Juliette is barely beginning to reach adulthood in her early twenties, and everyone sees her and indeed treats her as 'a young girl', something she is starting to be conscious of resenting.)
Seeing herself as the Appointed Hand of Vengeance, she is distressed and confused by her own continuing human fallibility: "she felt small and petty[...], ashamed of her high spirits and light-heartedness, ashamed of that feeling of sudden pity and admiration for the man who had done her and her family so deep an injury, which she was too feeble, too vacillating, to avenge". It is not until she has committed her betrayal that she realises just what Déroulède means to her and just what a terrible thing she has done. Part of the theme of the novel is that they both have to learn to look beyond their black and white absolutes -- although it is a little much for Percy Blakeney to draw the moral of "his own great, true love for the woman who once had so deeply wronged him" and say that a man cannot truly love a sinless ideal, when he himself had previously frozen Marguerite out of his life for a year on the mere suspicion that she could not be trusted... :-p
One of the unexpected things about the book is the way that the author conveys an added sense of authenticity by alluding to the supposed historical record in a way that, as a child, I took at absolute face value: "that denunciation of Citizen-Deputy Déroulède which has become a historical document.... You have all seen it at the Musée Carnavalet in its glass case". "It is all indelibly placed on record in the 'Bulletin du Tribunal Révolutionnaire,' under date 25th Fructidor, year I. of the Revolution. Anyone who cares may read, for the Bulletin is in the Archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris.... The Bulletin says that she took out her handkerchief and wiped her face with it: elle s'essuya le front qui fut perlé de sueur. The heat had become oppressive." "Many accounts, more or less authentic, have been published of the events known to history as the 'Fructidor Riots'..." (but which appear to exist nowhere outside these pages, at least according to Google -- a resource naturally not available to the reader of 1913!)
Chauvelin, as mentioned, does not feature in this novel; the antagonist, insofar as there is one, is Citizen-Deputy Merlin, Minister of Justice and Déroulède's jealous enemy in the National Convention, and "author of that infamous Law of the Suspect" (although, as with the Marquis de Chauvelin, a strictly fictional version; in real life the Loi des suspects was not actually passed until September 1793, while this novel takes place in August of that year). And there is also the agitator Lenoir, whom I immediately found suspicious on account of his size, although he had apparently been around for a year or more -- and who of course eventually proves to be Blakeney in disguise, stirring up trouble in order to cover his schemes. Though I do wonder how, with the best will in the world, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Sir Percy managed to dispose "his dark hairy arms over the table" in his assumed role -- perhaps arm wigs are a thing? ;-) (Presumably a sufficient coating of dirt can achieve a great deal...)
I'm assuming that, given his skill at disguise, both the "broad provincial accent, somewhat difficult to locate", and the "certain drawl of o's and a's that would have betrayed the Britisher to an observant ear" in Déroulède's study, are a deliberate affectation in what is presumably flawless French when it needs to be. There is also an interesting verbal shift between Sir Percy as plotter addressing Juliette "gaily, and with that pleasant drawl of his", and, a moment or two later, issuing orders as the Scarlet Pimpernel: "In the room you will find a disguise, which I pray you to don with all haste. La! they are filthy rags, I own"/"These uniforms will not do now; there are bundles of abominable clothes here. Will you all don them as quickly as you can?"
Overall I find I appreciate the book these days better than I did when I was hoping for it to be another swashbuckling adventure. Though I still think Juliette gets off far too easily and Déroulède's blind adoration of her should have been far more shaken, even if he does forgive her in the end.
(It does, in retrospect, occur to me that it is a trifle odd that Déroulède, a revolutionary Deputy of the National Convention, is apparently completely aware of the double identity of Sir Percy Blakeney at a time when nobody in England save the members of the League and certainly nobody in France is in on the secret -- just how well do these two know one another?)
This book was billed in various editions as 'Further Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel' and 'A Scarlet Pimpernel Story', but in fact as a sequel to the enormous success of the original Scarlet Pimpernel novel it is a somewhat unexpected choice; the Scarlet Pimpernel himself has little more than a walk-on role, and the main character is an idealistic Citizen Deputy in the National Convention who is denounced to the authorities by a young aristocrat in revenge for events that had occurred before the Revolution. It's a bold development on Orczy's part, if nothing else, and I suspect may have disconcerted the contemporary audience as much as it disconcerted me when I first read it as a child, for in her next book she returns to the old set-up of Sir Percy squaring off against a returning Chauvelin in order to save the captive Marguerite. But this one is quite a departure, and I can appreciate it now more than I did on my original reading. (And my 1950s pulp-fiction edition -- now subtitled "The Fifth Adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel" after the arrival of some earlier 'prequels' -- was on its forty-seventh impression in the forty years since its first publication, so it clearly didn't do too badly...)
I actually got unexpected echoes of Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" at points in this book, perhaps because of the Parisian setting and the role of public opinion and of swaying the mob. The novel opens with what is basically a condemnation of the ancien régime, as Paul Déroulède, a wealthy parvenu barely tolerated among the aristocracy for his money, finds himself compelled to a senseless duel by a social code that considers it bourgeois to apologise, and then forced into resuming the fight and killing his young opponent even after honour has been satisfied. The boy's fourteen-year-old sister Juliette is then obliged by their father to take an oath to destroy Déroulède by any means available, on pain of the eternal torment of her brother's soul if he should remain unavenged -- a threat which at that impressionable age horrifies her.
She takes refuge in a convent, but the Revolution intervenes. With the Archbishop who had promised to absolve her of her vow a casualty of the turmoil, with the religious foundation broken up and the nuns sent to their deaths, with all the previous property of her family confiscated, Juliette, the heiress and last surviving descendant of the Duc de Marny, ends up living on the charity of her old nurse, with nothing to cling to save the memory of her 'sublime mission' of vengeance. After the notorious murder of Marat at the hands of a girl of her own age, she resolves that "Charlotte Corday, the half-educated little provincial, should not put to shame Mademoiselle de Marny, daughter of a hundred dukes, of those who had made France before she took to unmaking herself", and comes up with a scheme to trick her way into Déroulède's house and into his confidence.
Meanwhile 'Citizen Déroulède' has contrived to survive "the most seething time of that most seething revolution" unscathed -- so far. He is no longer wealthy, having "had sufficient prudence to give away in good time that which, undoubtedly, would have been taken away from him later on", and by giving without stint at a time when the people of Paris were in their most desperate need had won the devotion of the mob, however fickle that might prove to be; better yet, he had had the good fortune to be described as "harmless" by Marat before the latter was murdered, and the chance of that murder has cast a subsequent halo of infallibility over the martyred man's pronouncements. He sits as a member of the National Convention, albeit as a member of the moderate Gironde in an era when it is no longer aristocrats but fellow-revolutionaries who are increasingly condemned to the guillotine... and, although Juliette has as yet no idea of this, he just happens to be hatching plans for a rescue of the imprisoned Queen Marie-Antoinette, motivated by precisely the same pity and generosity that has made him the idol of the starving rabble who hate her.
The Queen's case is so hopeless that even the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, which maintains its mystique by never undertaking any task that does not succeed, is not prepared to attempt it, and, as history inexorably informs us, Paul Déroulède does not manage to get very far with his scheme. But when Juliette overhears his intentions, she takes it as a sign that Fate has inexorably appointed her as his executioner, and sends in an anonymous denunciation of the man who has shown her nothing but kindness. It is not until he confesses his love for her -- the love that he has always considered hopeless, because he is a republican and a revolutionary, the enemy of her class, and because he was, however unwillingly, the instrument of her brother's death, even though he has tried to pay for that by helping her -- that it dawns on Juliette that what she feels for him is not hate but love in her turn.
But it is already too late, and all she can do is attempt to sacrifice herself in order to save him and repay the consequences of what she has done, a sacrifice that Déroulède is by his nature unable to allow her to carry through, thus inevitably dooming them both. Enter his old friend the Scarlet Pimpernel as deus ex machina...
I think the reason I disliked this book as a child (besides the disappointingly low Pimpernel content) was that I really didn't care for Juliette; I had no sympathy for her romantic quandaries and would have much preferred to see Déroulède paired off with the unswervingly loyal and resourceful Anne Mie, who gets very much the thin end of the wedge in this story. She is the one person who sees through Juliette's deliberate attempt to endanger herself in order to get Paul Déroulède's ready sympathy, and who not only jumps to the correct conclusion as to the author of the denunciation that devastates their household, but gets the truth out of Juliette using the time-honoured strategem of a piece of blank paper; she tries to enlist Sir Percy Blakeney's help, only to be told that there is nothing he can do ("if, indeed, she turned out to be false, or even treacherous, she would, nevertheless, still hold a place in Déroulède's very soul, which no one else would ever fill"). And the only happiness she gets is the discovery that "hers was the nature born to abnegation... and destined to find bliss therein"; it is enough, in the end, for her to be forgiven for hurting the man she loves by revealing to him Juliette's betrayal. Anne Mie is doomed to play the role of Eponine: she has loved him unswervingly all her life, but received only pity and chivalrous friendship in return ("what a life I might have known... but he never saw me there").
I have more sympathy for Juliette now -- and more tolerance for romance in my fiction! Despite the tumultuous events she has lived through, she is extremely sheltered and immature; indeed, emotionally she has barely grown up since the traumatic night when her brother's body was brought home. (If you work it out, she is almost the same age as Marguerite Blakeney, but where Marguerite, likewise orphaned at a young age, earned her own living and held court among brilliant and witty admirers from the age of eighteen, Juliette has been protected and supported by others her whole life, even if that only amounts to sharing the meagre savings of her old nurse in the refuge of an obscure garret. Marguerite is all woman; Juliette is barely beginning to reach adulthood in her early twenties, and everyone sees her and indeed treats her as 'a young girl', something she is starting to be conscious of resenting.)
Seeing herself as the Appointed Hand of Vengeance, she is distressed and confused by her own continuing human fallibility: "she felt small and petty[...], ashamed of her high spirits and light-heartedness, ashamed of that feeling of sudden pity and admiration for the man who had done her and her family so deep an injury, which she was too feeble, too vacillating, to avenge". It is not until she has committed her betrayal that she realises just what Déroulède means to her and just what a terrible thing she has done. Part of the theme of the novel is that they both have to learn to look beyond their black and white absolutes -- although it is a little much for Percy Blakeney to draw the moral of "his own great, true love for the woman who once had so deeply wronged him" and say that a man cannot truly love a sinless ideal, when he himself had previously frozen Marguerite out of his life for a year on the mere suspicion that she could not be trusted... :-p
One of the unexpected things about the book is the way that the author conveys an added sense of authenticity by alluding to the supposed historical record in a way that, as a child, I took at absolute face value: "that denunciation of Citizen-Deputy Déroulède which has become a historical document.... You have all seen it at the Musée Carnavalet in its glass case". "It is all indelibly placed on record in the 'Bulletin du Tribunal Révolutionnaire,' under date 25th Fructidor, year I. of the Revolution. Anyone who cares may read, for the Bulletin is in the Archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris.... The Bulletin says that she took out her handkerchief and wiped her face with it: elle s'essuya le front qui fut perlé de sueur. The heat had become oppressive." "Many accounts, more or less authentic, have been published of the events known to history as the 'Fructidor Riots'..." (but which appear to exist nowhere outside these pages, at least according to Google -- a resource naturally not available to the reader of 1913!)
Chauvelin, as mentioned, does not feature in this novel; the antagonist, insofar as there is one, is Citizen-Deputy Merlin, Minister of Justice and Déroulède's jealous enemy in the National Convention, and "author of that infamous Law of the Suspect" (although, as with the Marquis de Chauvelin, a strictly fictional version; in real life the Loi des suspects was not actually passed until September 1793, while this novel takes place in August of that year). And there is also the agitator Lenoir, whom I immediately found suspicious on account of his size, although he had apparently been around for a year or more -- and who of course eventually proves to be Blakeney in disguise, stirring up trouble in order to cover his schemes. Though I do wonder how, with the best will in the world, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Sir Percy managed to dispose "his dark hairy arms over the table" in his assumed role -- perhaps arm wigs are a thing? ;-) (Presumably a sufficient coating of dirt can achieve a great deal...)
I'm assuming that, given his skill at disguise, both the "broad provincial accent, somewhat difficult to locate", and the "certain drawl of o's and a's that would have betrayed the Britisher to an observant ear" in Déroulède's study, are a deliberate affectation in what is presumably flawless French when it needs to be. There is also an interesting verbal shift between Sir Percy as plotter addressing Juliette "gaily, and with that pleasant drawl of his", and, a moment or two later, issuing orders as the Scarlet Pimpernel: "In the room you will find a disguise, which I pray you to don with all haste. La! they are filthy rags, I own"/"These uniforms will not do now; there are bundles of abominable clothes here. Will you all don them as quickly as you can?"
Overall I find I appreciate the book these days better than I did when I was hoping for it to be another swashbuckling adventure. Though I still think Juliette gets off far too easily and Déroulède's blind adoration of her should have been far more shaken, even if he does forgive her in the end.
(It does, in retrospect, occur to me that it is a trifle odd that Déroulède, a revolutionary Deputy of the National Convention, is apparently completely aware of the double identity of Sir Percy Blakeney at a time when nobody in England save the members of the League and certainly nobody in France is in on the secret -- just how well do these two know one another?)