Description
The Scarlet Pimpernel (version 3 dramatic reading)
CHAPTER I PARIS: SEPTEMBER, 1792
A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in
name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures,
animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The
hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade,
at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying
monument to the nation’s glory and his own vanity.
During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at
its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries,
of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for
liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late
hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for
the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the
barricades for the night.
And so the crowd rushed away from the Place de la Greve and made for the
various barricades in order to watch this interesting and amusing sight.
It was to be seen every day, for those aristos were such fools! They
were traitors to the people of course, all of them, men, women, and
children, who happened to be descendants of the great men who since the
Crusades had made the glory of France: her old NOBLESSE. Their ancestors
had oppressed the people, had crushed them under the scarlet heels of
their dainty buckled shoes, and now the people had become the rulers
of France and crushed their former masters–not beneath their heel, for
they went shoeless mostly in these days–but a more effectual weight,
the knife of the guillotine.
Product ID: 9781776774456
Sku: 9781776774456
