Quote:
Originally Posted by stuartjmz
This is one of the the things that threw me when I bought the Delphi Classics Edition of her collected works. I thought The league was the sequel too, but here is its listing of all Scarlet Pimpernel stories, with publication dates
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The League comes second in the internal chronology; it's set in early 1793, right after the first book.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
And then there's the quote you put in above (which personally I find rather nauseating).
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Another thing I was looking at more closely this time around and which ties into the two snippets I quoted above was historical accuracy. It doesn't "matter," but Orczy's timing is off. The book is set just after the September massacres which by some accounts kicked off the Reign of Terror and by others the Reign of Terror didn't start until the following year, after the execution of Louis XVI. In any case, the wholesale slaughter of aristocrats was just starting and it was impossible that Marguerite could have denounced the Marquis de St. Cyr two years earlier to the tribunal causing his execution.
There were little things too: Marguerite couldn't have been a friend of the Princess of Wales as the Prince of Wales hadn't yet married (I really think that one must have been an error that was never caught, as being a friend of the Princess of Wales would hardly have gone over well with the Prince), the Princesse de Lamballe wouldn't have been considered young, as she was in her 40s, and so on. But I admit all this is just rabbit holes; it doesn't matter to the story.
What it seems Orczy got right as far as my knowledge extends was society. The clothing, the mores, the attitudes: it all seems pretty accurate. And thus the kissing of the steps which seems over the top to the modern reader fits in with the way an 18th century gentleman might express his passions. There was a lot of posturing and put-on emotion.
One extraneous comment: those tiny hands of Marguerite's! Tiny hands have a very unpleasant association for the current reader, at least the American one.