书名：The Scarlet Pimpernel红花侠

难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1140L
作者：Baroness Orczy奥尔瑞夫人
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2000
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451527622
商品尺寸：10.8 x 1.9 x 17.5 cm
包装：简装
页数：288
The Scarlet Pimpernel《红花侠》是英国女作家奥尔瑞夫人以世界历史上大型事件之一——法国大革命为题材，所写成的代表性杰作。此时，竟有同情法国贵族处境的正义之士出现，他巧妙地救出革命党人处心积虑逮捕的贵族，使其重获自由。这个人物被称为“红花侠”，也就是本故事的主角。

本书为Signet Classics推出的英文原版，内容完整无删减，书本轻巧便携。
A timeless novel of adventure, intrigue, and romance is sparked by one man’s defiance in the face of authority...
The year is 1792. The French Revolution, driven to excess by its own triumph, has turned into a reign of terror. Daily, tumbrels bearing new victims to the guillotine roll over the cobbled streets of Paris.... Thus the stage is set for one of the most enthralling novels of historical adventure ever written.
The mysterious figure known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, sworn to rescue helpless men, women, and children from their doom; his implacable foe, the French agent Chauvelin, relentlessly hunting him down; and lovely Marguerite Blakeney, a beautiful French exile married to an English lord and caught in a terrible conflict of loyalties—all play their parts in a suspenseful tale that ranges from the squalid slums of Paris to the aristocratic salons of London, from intrigue on a great English country estate to the final denouement on the cliffs of the French coast.
There have been many imitations of The Scarlet Pimpernel, but none has ever equaled its superb sense of color and drama and its irresistible gift of wonderfully romantic escape.
With an Introduction by Gary Hoppenstand

Review
“Arguably the best adventure story ever published and certainly the most influential that appeared during the early decades of the twentieth century.”  — Gary Hoppenstand
法国大革命发生在十八世纪末叶。在大革命以前法国由波旁王朝当政，革命党人用暴力处死了国王和他的家人，另外组织了共和政府。那些初掌政权的革命党人，为了铲除异己，便乘机把所有法国贵族不分男女老幼都妄加罪名逮捕，一一送上断头台，形成了历史上众所周知的“恐怖时代”。

可是，就在此时，竟有同情法国贵族处境的正义之士出现，他巧妙地救出革命党人处心积虑逮捕的贵族，使其重获自由。
这个人物被称为“红花侠”，也就是奥尔瑞夫人的《红花侠》的主角。
他是个胸怀磊落、性格爽朗的汉子。每当他要出面解救某一个贵族之前，必定事先通知法国共和政府那个贵族的名字，然后在戒备森严的情况下，巧妙地将人救出。他那随机应变的智略和英勇大胆的作风，在《红花侠》中描写得淋漓尽致，真是一个充满侠义豪情的人。
奥尔瑞夫人（1865－1947），英国女作家，出生于匈牙利，早年求学于比利时、法国，16岁进入伦敦美术学院，后与一位艺术家结婚。1900年奥尔瑞夫人开始了文学创作，写有大量优秀的通俗小说，被誉为“二十世纪第1位备受欢迎的作家”。其代表作为《红花侠》以及被评价为是历史上好看的“安乐椅神探”模式推理小说的《角落里的老人》，其地位和成就至今无人逾越。

The byline used by Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy (1865-1947) was Baroness Orczy. Orczy was born in Tarna-Ors, Hungary, the only daughter of Baron Felix Orczy, a noted composer and conductor, and his wife, Emma. Orczy moved with her parents from Budapest to Brussels to Paris and then to London, where she learned to speak English at the age of fifteen. She was educated at West London School of Art. Orcy’s first detective stories appeared in magazines, but as a writer, she gained fame in 1903 with the stage version of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In the late 1910s, Orcy and her husband moved to Monte Carlo, where they stayed during the Nazi occupation. Her husband died in 1943, and after World War II, she spent her remaining years in England.

Gary Hoppenstand is a professor who teaches in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. He has published numerous books and articles on topics ranging from nineteenth-century British and American literature to film studies. He has been nominated twice for the World Fantasy Award, and he has won the Popular Culture Association’s National Book Award for his textbook, Popular Fiction: An Anthology. He has worked on a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste and has published a Penguin Classics omnibus edition of Anthony Hope’s two novels The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau.

A surging, 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, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation’s glory and his own vanity.
During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty 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 away from the Place de la Grève and made for the various barricades in order to watch this interesting and amusing sight.
It was to be seen every day, for those aristos were such fools! They were traitors to the people of course, all of them, men, women, and children, who happened to be descendants of the great men who since the Crusades had made the glory of France: her old noblesse. Their ancestors had oppressed the people, had crushed them under the scarlet heels of their dainty buckled shoes, and now the people had become the rulers of France and crushed their former masters—not beneath their heel, for they went shoeless mostly in these days—but beneath a more effectual weight, the knife of the guillotine.
And daily, hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims—old men, young women, tiny children, even until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen.
But this was as it should be: were not the people now the rulers of France? Every aristocrat was a traitor, as his ancestors had been before him: for two hundred years now the people had sweated, and toiled, and starved, to keep a lustful court in lavish extravagance; now the descendants of those who had helped to make those courts brilliant had to hide for their lives—to fly, if they wished to avoid the tardy vengeance of the people.
And they did try to hide, and tried to fly: that was just the fun of the whole thing. Every afternoon before the gates closed and the market carts went out in procession by the various barricades, some fool of an aristo endeavoured to evade the clutches of the Committee of Public Safety. In various disguises, under various pretexts, they tried to slip through the barriers which were so well guarded by citizen soldiers of the Republic. Men in women’s clothes, women in male attire, children disguised in beggars’ rags: there were some of all sorts: ci-devant counts, marquises, even dukes, who wanted to fly from France, reach England or some other equally accursed country, and there try to rouse foreign feeling against the glorious Revolution, or to raise an army in order to liberate the wretched prisoners in the Temple, who had once called themselves sovereigns of France.