Scaramouche: He Was Born With a Gift of Laughter

‘He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.’ It may be the greatest opening line in all of adventure fiction, and the novel it opens — Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche — earns it. This is the swashbuckler with a brain: a story of revolution, revenge, and a man who fights his way to justice with a sword, a stage, and a tongue.

André-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer in the France of 1789, watches a friend murdered in a rigged duel by an arrogant nobleman, and swears revenge. To hide from the law he joins a troupe of players, taking the mask of the clown Scaramouche — and from that unlikely disguise he becomes, in turn, a brilliant actor, a fencing-master, and a firebrand of the Revolution, hunting his enemy across the collapse of the old world.

What lifts it above the ordinary adventure is that Sabatini sets it against the real French Revolution, and takes the politics seriously. André-Louis is a cynic radicalized into a revolutionary, and the novel is as much about the birth of a new age as about one man’s vendetta — with a final twist that turns the whole revenge plot on its head.

This edition gathers it with Captain Blood and Sabatini’s other romances.

Read The Works of Rafael Sabatini →