Complete and unabridged, with 100 full-page plates by Louis-Léopold Boilly, Antoine-Jean Gros and Pierre-Antoine Demachy. 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 first masked-hero double life in modern fiction, ancestor of every one since. A hundred plates of Gainsborough and Géricault trace the Revolution's reach from London drawing rooms to Napoleon's battlefields, the world the Pimpernel slips through in disguise.