Scaramouche

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." So begins one of the great swashbucklers of the twentieth century. André-Louis Moreau is a cool, clever young provincial lawyer with no cause and no quarrel — until his closest friend, the young idealist Philippe de Vilmorin, is goaded into a duel and cut down in cold blood by the aristocrat Marquis de La Tour d'Azyr, a master swordsman certain to go unpunished. The murder lights a fire in André-Louis that nothing will put out but vengeance.

Unable to reach the marquis through a law that serves his class, André-Louis takes up the only weapons within his reach, one after another. He becomes a revolutionary orator, rousing the mob of France with a dead man's words until there is a price on his head. He hides among a troupe of strolling players and takes the black mask of Scaramouche, the quick-tongued rogue of the Italian comedy, for his own. And at last, in a Paris fencing academy, he learns the one art that can bring him face to face with La Tour d'Azyr on equal terms — while the Revolution rises around them and Aline de Kercadiou, whom both men love, hangs in the balance.

First published in 1921, Scaramouche made Rafael Sabatini a bestselling author on two continents and remains the model of the historical adventure: swift, ironic, and unputdownable, with the French Revolution for its stage and the old commedia dell'arte for its controlling metaphor. Beneath the duels and disguises it is a serious novel about justice and revenge, identity and the masks we wear — and it turns, at the last, on a secret of parentage that recasts the whole story.

This edition presents the complete novel in clean, modern typesetting, with an editor's foreword on the book's composition, technique, and themes, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.