The Scarlet Pimpernel's league against the Terror at Nantes, where Carrier is drowning prisoners in the Loire. Pierre Adet, a Breton miller's son whose family was broken by the Duc de Kernogan's justice, comes back years later as Citizen Martin-Roget to take his revenge on the duke's daughter Yvonne — just married to Lord Tony Dewhurst, one of the league — and to use her as bait for the Pimpernel himself. Orczy wrote a dozen Pimpernel books and this is among the tightest, moving from Bath to Nantes; the vengeance of the miller's son is the part that gives the book its weight. Fifty-nine plates by Watteau, Gainsborough, and others trace the courtship and costume of the eighteenth century, the world of Bath and its exiles that Yvonne and her husband leave behind.
