The Scarlet Pimpernel/The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/The Good Earth/The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood [antikvár]

t Ti-%Baroness Emmuska Orczy used to say that The Scarlet^Pimpernel was born in a subway station. Waiting in the^London Underground one day, and worrying about a^newspaper commission for a serial, she saw a man whose appearance immediately suggested to her the role of the?Scarlet Pimpernel. She hurried home and started to write,Sand the story, later published as a book, became such an%enormous success that she continued to write about the^adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel and his league of^faithful followers at the rate of two books a year.5}-Baroness Orczy was born in Hungary in 1863, theTi'daughter of a feudal landowner who was also a fine pianist.%In 1880 Baron Felix Orczy was exiled from his homelandJand took refuge, with his wife and daughter, in England,^where he taught piano. The young baroness met her hus-^band-to-be, Montagu Barstow, when they were both study-^ing art. After their marriage they went to Paris and livedJ3-in the bohemian Latin Quarter, struggling along for some years on Barstow's sparse earnings as an artist, although%he later became famous and successful. With such a back-^ground it is not surprising that Baroness Orczy should^show such evident sympathy for aristocratic exilesand^such knowledge of France and her people.jJ-In 1898 she and her husband returned to England, and it was then that chance turned Baroness Orczy to5writing. Their landlord's daughter won a short-story%competition, and the winning piece was read aloud to the^assembled boarders. Later the baroness declared to her^husband, "Why, I could write a better story than that!"^The French Revolution has inspired many novelists, but perhaps no character has caught the imagination ofjj.readers in quite the same way as the baroness' gallant,^daring adventurer who rescued condemned French aristo-icrats from beneath the knife of the guillotine.paris: september 1792Asurging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade.During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in past centuries, of ancient names and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for Hberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the barricades for the night.And so the crowd rushed from the Place de Greve and made for the various barricades to watch this amusing sight.It was to be seen every day, for those aristos were such fools! They were traitors, of course. Their ancestors had crushed the people under the scarlet heels of their dainty buckled shoes, and now the people had become the rulers of France and crushed their former mastersnot beneath their heels, for they went shoeless mostly in these daysbut beneath the knife of the guillotine.This was as it should be: for two hundred years now the people had sweated and toiled and starved to keep a lustful court in lavish