Emma Orczy

The Laughing Cavalier Emma Orczy

The year is 1623, the place Haarlem in the Netherlands. Diogenes - the first Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel's ancestor - and his friends Pythagoras and Socrates defend justice and the royalist cause. The famous artist Frans Hals also makes an appearance in this historical adventure. Orczy maintains that Hal's celebrated portrait of The Laughing Cavalier is actually a portrayal of the Scarlet Pimpernel's ancestor. If so it must also come from those members of the Blakeney family in whose veins runs the blood of that Sir Percy Blakeney who is known to history as the Scarlet Pimpernel-for they in a manner are responsible for the telling of this veracious chronicle. For the past eight years now-ever since the true story of The Scarlet Pimpernel was put on record by the present author-these gentle, kind, inquisitive friends have asked me to trace their descent back to an ancestor more remote than was Sir Percy, to one in fact who by his life and by his deeds stands forth from out the distant past as a conclusive proof that the laws which govern the principles of heredity are as unalterable as those that rule the destinies of the universe. They have pointed out to me that since Sir Percy Blakeney's was an exceptional personality, possessing exceptional characteristics which his friends pronounced sublime and his detractors arrogant-he must have had an ancestor in the dim long ago who was, like him, exceptional, like him possessed of qualities which call forth the devotion of friends and the rancour of enemies. Nay, more! there must have existed at one time or another a man who possessed that same sunny disposition, that same irresistible laughter, that same careless insouciance and adventurous spirit which were subsequently transmitted to his descendants, of whom the Scarlet Pimpernel himself was the most distinguished individual.