One of my favorite adventure novels when I was a teen-ager was Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini (for those not familiar with Sabatini, one of his more famous characters was Captain Blood—Errol Flynn's early career was made by playing [not all that well] Sabatini heroes).

Scaramouche was a tight, suspenseful historical novel set in the run-up to the French Revolution. The hero, André-Louis Moreau, a young country lawyer, tries to get justice when an aristocrat cold-bloodedly murders his best friend in a mock-duel because he has liberal ideas and "a dangerous gift of eloquence." But he is blown off by the King's Lieutenant. Deciding that he must assume his murdered friend's "dangerous gift of eloquence," he delivers an impassioned speech to a volatile crowd of students in the city square. Almost causing a riot, he becomes a wanted man and has to flee for his life. Serediptously, he runs into a group of traveling players. He joins them, and hides in plain sight—on stage, but behind make-up. Some time later, seeing an opportunity to wreak vengeance on his enemy, he uses that "dangerous gift" again, this time from the stage of a Paris theater, inciting a riot that almost results in the death of the aristocrat, who is in the audience. He has to flee again, and hides out by gaining employment as an assistant fencing master in a small Paris fencing school. He is pressed into politics by a student friend in the National Assembly, where the aristocrat is a representative of Privilege. His wry wit draws the wrath of the representatives of the Right. One thing leads to another, and he winds up facing his old enemy, the aristocrat, sword in hand, in a formal duel early one morning in a park outside of Paris.

Scaramouche is a stock character in the commedia dell'arte, similar to Figaro. His schtick is plotting and scheming, then scurrying away when his scheme hits the fan. This is the character that André-Louis plays in the theater company, and he wryly notes that, in his case, it's type-casting.

Sabatini wove his characters around actual, carefully researched historical events, then managed one helluva surprise toward the end of the story. I pull the book out and reread it every few years. Still a gripping story, even if I can recite parts of it from memory.

It was made into a movie in 1952, starring Stewart Granger, Janet Leigh, Mel Ferrer, and Eleanor Parker. Janet Leigh was fine as Aline, but the rest of the characters just weren't right. Stewart Granger was too old as André-Louis (where André-Louis is witty and sly, Granger is angry and blustering), Mel Ferrer was too young as the Marquis, and Eleanor Parker as the girl André-Louis met among the traveling players, was all wrong. And the plot was just plain silly compared to the deep-laid story in the novel. They borrowed (and screwed up) the basic plot twist, and some of the stage business (the company of traveling players, but they even made a spoof out of that). But in the novel, the hero learns to handle a sword, not in three lessons, but over a year of taking a daily lesson from the master, and fencing several hours every day, sparring with the master's pupils. He gradually develops into a skillful and formidable swordsman himself. In the movie, Stewart Granger takes on his enemy, not in the Bois de Boulogne in a formal duel complete with seconds, but up and down stairs and swinging on chandeliers in a Paris theater. And he doesn't fence with skill and precision, but with typical Hollywood-style hacking, slashing, and jumping over furniture. [Incidentally, Hollywood doesn't have to hoke up the sword fights just to make them exciting; in the 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro the duel in the alcalde's study between Diego and Esteban (Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone—both actors were good fencers off-screen as well as on) was some damned fine swordplay, plenty exciting and suspenseful.]

To do justice to Scaramouche, you couldn't cram it into a two or three hour movie. It would take something like a Masterpiece Theatre miniseries.

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
                                       —opening line of Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

Don Firth