The Scarlet Pimpernel

I am rereading the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hutchison), a wonderful romantic, swashbuckling, 1905 adventure novel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy, set during the early French Revolution. Our hero, Sir Percy, passes for a foppish baronet. His alter ego, the Scarlet Pimpernel, along with nineteen friends, smuggles French aristocrats to England before they are guillotined by French revolutionaries in the Reign of Terror. After each successful venture, Sir Percy or one of his company leaves a scrap of paper with a drawing of the little red flower, the pimpernel.

Just as Dickens introduced the first detective in literary history, Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, so, according to the Wikipedia entry, at least, Orczy gives us the first hero with a secret identity, the ancestor of Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman.

I say rereading because I know I must have read it a hundred years ago.  As a teenager, my dad read his way through the Santa Barbara Library, dictionaries and all. At some point in my young life, he mentioned this book, and so I read it.

But I did not follow my own rule:  if you don't know a word, put down what you are reading and look it up. I know this because I just now came across the word defalcation, which, as it happens, means embezzlement, and did not know its meaning. Apparently, I just could not drag myself away from the story to look it up in a dry old dictionary.

To this day, I still love the hero who lives as Everyman but does great deeds in secret. And I try to follow my own rules.

Anagalis arvensis, the scarlet pimpernel, a low-growing plant in the primrose family native to Great Britain.

CC by-SA 3.0. Created by Jean-Jacques Milan.