"Mam'zelle Guillotine", Baroness Orczy

[igenlode]

The scenes in England at the beginning are verging on self-parody (and abuse of adjectives) on Orczy's part, but the French setting is vivid and alive, and it's interesting to have a female antagonist for a change, while Gabrielle gets an unusually detailed backstory to explain what made her the way she is: I was getting strong flashes of Madame Defarge in "Tale of Two Cities", the victim who becomes a monster out to destroy an entire family. (It's hard to sympathise with the former Vicomte who dumps his inconvenient lower-class mistress into lifetime incarceration, but his wife and children at least have nothing to do with it...)

Unfortunately at this point in the series you can pretty much assume that any character described as 'tall' is going to be the Scarlet Pimpernel in disguise, and so it proves; the genuinely potentially misleading appearance of the 'real' André is almost immediately undermined by having him openly incite an uprising to sabotage Gabrielle's plans on obviously fake grounds, thus leaving us in no doubt as to which side he is on. The plots really work best when the reader is deceived along with the protagonists, and that becomes increasingly difficult over time.

At least Marguerite manages to travel to France *without* getting captured and providing a plot-lever against her husband for once, although she doesn't do anything useful. It would have been interesting to see her actually working alongside Sir Percy on this occasion - she is after all a trained actress - but either he is too chivalrous to allow her to take risks or else on past precedent he simply doesn't trust her anywhere near danger!

Comments

[paserbyp]

Baroness Emma Magdalena Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci, usually known as Baroness Orczy (the name under which she was published), was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright.

Orczy held strong political views. She was a firm believer in the superiority of the aristocracy, as well as being a supporter of British imperialism and militarism. During World War I, Orczy formed the Women of England's Active Service League, an unofficial organisation aimed at encouraging women to persuade men to volunteer for active service in the armed forces. Her aim was to enlist 100,000 women who would pledge "to persuade every man I know to offer his service to his country". Some 20,000 women joined her organisation. Orczy strongly opposed the Soviet Union.

Mam'zelle Guillotine, by Baroness Orczy first published in 1940, it was the last novel Orczy wrote featuring the Pimpernel and is dedicated to those fighting in World War II:
"To all those who are fighting in the air, on the water and on land for our country and for our homes, I dedicate this because it is to them that we shall owe a happy issue out of all our troubles and a lasting peace." - Emmuska Orczy, Monte Carlo - 1939-40

[igenlode]

as well as being a supporter of British imperialism and militarism

In other words, she held the normal political views of the majority of people in her era ;-)

But I've seen some of her patriotic writings, e.g. "The Scarlet Pimpernel Looks at the World", and I'm afraid it's practically unreadable in terms of style alone:

Nay, ’tis not romance you lack in this twentieth century. Had but one quarter as much of it come our way in the days when I frequented Richmond and Vauxhall, my faith! we should have been staggered by it. We had to seek Romance; for you it flaunts its magic before your eyes every day and in a hundred different ways. By gad! when the last word of this book is written and the last tale told, I shall feel happy in the thought that I had a sight of all that is roseate and silver in the midst of the drab existence you complain of.

(from Project Gutenberg)

I hadn't realised that "Mam'zelle Guillotine" was such a late book (i.e. that she hadn't written any others in the series after it -- I did read the wartime dedication, so knew that it had originally been printed in 1940). In that case, I'm not surprised that the 'period banter' at the start verges on self-parody; as quoted above, her attempts at sounding eighteen-century had clearly gone way over the top by this point :-(
But in that case the rest of the book is surprisingly good for such a late entry...