Under the Red Robe

Gil de Berault, a duellist and gambler caught breaking the Cardinal's edict, is given a choice: the scaffold, or go to Béarn and bring back a wanted man — by staying in the man's house and betraying his sister. Weyman failed at the bar and was briefly jailed in France as a suspected spy; this 1894 novel is his tightest, and the narrator is a scoundrel who has to be watched.