An English fop with the finest lace in London leads a league that snatches aristocrats from the guillotine, and the Republic's cleverest agent is set on finding out who he is. Orczy's book was turned down by a dozen publishers; she and her husband staged it as a play first, it ran for four years, and the novel then sold in the millions — the hero with a secret identity in its classic form, ancestor of Zorro and every masked avenger since. Fifty-seven plates of portraiture and naval painting, from Gainsborough to Lawrence, supply the faces and the ships of the age that made the League possible.
