Wow!
Is it odd that one of the best Pimpernel books basically doesn't have the Pimpernel in it at all?
I'd been feeling like I must be "over" the Pimpernel books because the last few I've tried have wearied me a bit with their high-flown language, cookie-cutter ladies, and a godlike hero who is so unassailable that all suspense is gone... and then there was this!

The story is framed by Sir Percy, who's supposedly telling it, but you never really feel his presence again till right at the end.

Andre is a poor boy whose temper is often getting him in trouble with the higher-ups. After he grows up and the French Revolution begins, he skirts dangerously near to the bloodshed and the rising stars of the new republic, almost being counted as one of them. When he returns home to find his mother's house burned to the ground, and she's dead, he vows vengeance on the aristocrat who's responsible.

This aristocrat, de Marigny, is a pretty heartless guy, but he has a daughter who's really sweet, Aurore. She and Andre shared a "moment" in their childhood, and when he sees her again in adulthood, he moderates his vengeance toward her father, and says only that if she will marry him, she and her father will be kept safe from the bloodthirsty villagers, no matter what. She hates him for this, but pretty much has no choice; also, he is QUITE aggressive about this plan.

And the rest is, you know, a lovely tribute to Stockholm Syndrome... I sound sarcastic, but I really did just eat it up, it was a pretty compelling story of its type! At least Aurore had more gumption than some of the girls in the other Pimpernel books.
Anybody who's cool with the occasional novel about an alpha male, broody but misunderstood, will probably like this. ( )

As a depiction of an era, this is probably the most nuanced of Baroness Orczy's books. For the only time in the Scarlet Pimpernel series, we are meant to see that despite the excesses of the French Revolution, it was brought on by the cruelty and indifference of the royalty and aristocaracy in days before. Our hero is a young revolutionary driven not only by his own suffering but by genuine belief in the ideals for which the Republic is meant to strive, and our villain a Duke who who considers the common people of less consequence than his animals unless they happen to hold his life in their hands at the moment. There were hints that the Baroness could write such a book in the short story "The Chief's Way" in the anthology The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel," but we see less of Notara's activities in that story than we do Andre Vallon's in this, and the impression given is that he may have only been involved in the storming of the chateau in a momentarry lapse.

Still, in spite of the sharper insight displayed in this book, there are some parts of the storytelling that could have been improved. I would have liked to see what Vallon was doing between the fall of the Bastille and his time in the army, in the early days of the revolution, instead of going straight from the misery of the old regime to the panic of the Terror. Secondly, it has a little too much of the Old School romance trope of the heroine and the hero being constantly at odds until suddenly they realize they are in love, and you find yourself going "When did that happen?" We don't get Vallon's point of view much after the wedding, so we can assume that he has loved the heroine the whole time and covers it over with hatred because he's afraid of rejection, but it's never quite clear when or why she falls in love with him. She hears his friends tell stories of what a great man he is, but there's no apparent change in her feelings until suddenly he's in danger and she's madly in love with him. This sudden revelation works better in the Baroness' other novels, where the couples involved know each other before the book begins. ( )