Did I ever read this in days gone by?? Can't remember. But it was a fun quick read and I needed something like it after finishing the underwhelming and morbid Stiff (which seemed like 2 chapters worth of material shoved into 12). I keep returning to these period pieces (A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo). Why? Maybe the feel of authenticity accompanying times too distant for me to easily contradict their details. My internal judge can slumber and I can enjoy a story for a story.
Although the Baroness Orczy (had to look up the pronunciation of that = or-tsey) tends to repeat the plight of the heroine trying to save her husband from her own ignorant betrayal a lot, and there are whiffs of harlequin throughout the book, it never completely descends into romanticism. The hero is still a man (anatomically intact to the end).
A few notable bites:
No wonder that on this fine afternoon in September the crowd round Bibot’s gate was eager and excited. The lust of blood grows with its satisfaction, there is no satiety: the crowd had seen a hundred noble heads fall beneath the guillotine to-day, it wanted to make sure that it would see another hundred fall on the morrow.
“Loved me?—Well, Armand, I thought at one time that he did, or I should not have married him. I daresay,” she added, speaking very rapidly, as if she were about to lay down a heavy burden, which had oppressed her for months, “I daresay that even you thought—as everybody else did—that I married Sir Percy because of his wealth—but I assure you, dear, that it was not so. He seemed to worship me with a curious intensity of concentrated passion, which went straight to my heart. I had never loved anyone before, as you know, and I was four-and-twenty then—so I naturally thought that it was not in my nature to love. But it has always seemed to me that it must be heavenly to be loved blindly, passionately, wholly…worshipped, in fact—and the very fact that Percy was slow and stupid was an attraction for me, as I thought he would love me all the more."
You can find this book free in many places online. I read this kindle version, which had a working table of contents and cost less than $3.
