Pimpernelles, Book 1: The Pale Assassin

‘They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere.’ This phrase is from Baroness Orczy’s novels about an English aristocrat who rescues French noble families from the guillotine during the French revolution, and very few writers since have quite captured the style and spirit of these stories of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Patricia Elliott has dared to borrow his name for the series title of the first of her books, and it gives rise to a comparison which is unfavourable, not least because in this story there is no rescue from Madame La Guillotine.

Instead the heroine, a bored and rather spoiled girl, Eugénie, finds herself in Paris during the first part of the French Revolution, together with her brother Armand who tries to shield and protect her from his own part in a plot to rescue the King. Quite why Eugénie is left in Paris when her guardian flees to the country is not clear, but he has promised her in marriage to a shadowy villain, Le Fantôme. Eugénie then refuses to leave France to live in England with her uncle – at a time when women of her class would not have had much say in their future. When Armand decides to flee, at the last moment his place is taken by his friend Julien, helped extraordinarily by Hortense who used to be Eugénie’s governess but is now a government spy. The pair make a daring escape and rather unconvincingly encounter an English spy who helps them across the Channel.

The political background to the French revolution is not explained well enough, especially as Armand is a Royalist who believes the King should change to a constitutional monarch, but without the necessary information this is hard to understand. The girl on the cover is far too modern and sultry for the naïve and spoiled Eugénie. With some good editing this would have been a more readable tale, but as it is there is too much confusion and Eugénie is not a convincing heroine of her time.