There is no doubt that Sir Percy Blakeney, 'The Scarlet Pimpernel', is the most outstanding, as he certainly is the most popular character of Baroness Orczy's creations. This really is very astonishing because Sir Percy, besides being the perfect type of an English gentleman, is nothing if not British, whilst the Baroness herself, who created him, is Hungarian.

She was born at Tarna-Eörs, in the county of Heves, some fifty miles from Budapest. Tarna-Eörs lies in the centre of the Great Plain of Hungary, which is as flat as a tabletop and is almost exclusively devoted to corn-crowing. The Orczy family have owned considerable property there for many generations, and do still, but the Baroness' father, Baron Felix Orczy, started life in the diplomatic service of his country: he married Emma, daughter of Count Wass of Czege in Transylvania -- the Eastern part of Hungary, and our authoress -- Emmuska, which means little Emma -- is their only child.

All this seems so remote fromher subsequent life and work in the world of English letters that it requires explanation. After his father's death, Baron Felix Orczy came back from abroad and took up the farming of his property. But in the course of his diplomatic career he had picked up certain modern notions which were not at all suited to the archaic ideas prevailing in Hungary, and these he tried to introduce into the management of his estates. Into a country in which hitherto every kind of agricultural work had been done by hand he introduced the latest type of machinery and even set up a steam-mill.

The peasants -- very much like our own men in Lancanshire when the steam-loom was first brought to Manchester -- were terrified at first, then enraged. They looked upon all machinery, which they did not understand, as the invention of the devil, and when the smoke emerged out of the factory chimney, they looked upon it as coming from the fires of hell. The end of it all was that when, after harvest time, the entire crop of wheat stood in stacks on the fields, the poor people in their ignorance set fire to the whole thing -- the mill, the corn, the maize, the machinery -- and ruined not only the property but also its unfortunate owner.

The whole circumstances of this disastrous affair, which occurred when our Baroness was three years old, she has incorporated in her novel, A Son of the People.

Baron Orczy, thoroughly discouraged and disappointed with his attempts at farming, then settled down in Budapest, where he was able to devote himself to music of which he had always been passionately fond. The Abbé Liszt became his friend and dedicated one of the great Hungarian rhapsodies to him. The Baron was considered in those days one of the finest amateur musicians of his time, and was presently appointed director of the National Opera of Budapest -- a position he held for several years. Meanwhile, his little daughter's education was in the hands of a governess, and she learned to speak French and German. Her father resigned the directorship of the opera and took his wife and child to Brussels -- partly to give little Emmuska a more modern education and partly because the then Queen of the Belgians was a Hungarian Princess, and very musical, so he felt sure of a welcome in the Belgian capital. He had met with some financial reverses and was no longer very well off, so when he met some English friends who suggested that he should settle in London, where his music would be appreciated, he crossed the sea and with his wife and daughter -- now almost sixteen years old -- settled down in London. Here he conducted some of his own compositions at the Philharmonic Concerts, and sometimes conducted the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society -- and his opera, Il Rinnegato, was performed at Her Majesty's Theatre.

Meanwhile his little daughter went to a dame school to learn English, which language she picked up wonderfully quickly; then she entered Queen's College, and soon passed the Higher Examination for women -- always taking prizes for languages. Her artistic temperament urged her to take up painting -- to her father's disappointment, she showed no particular talen for music -- and she entered Heatherley's studios as an art student and worked there for five or six years. She had quite considerable success, and exhibited several of her pictures at the Royal Academy, one of them, 'The Jolly Young Waterman', being hung on the line. It was at Heatherley's that I met her. I was working there, and we became art student chums. Baron Orczy died very suddenly of heart failure, and his widow, the Baroness' mother, decided to return to Hungary, but his daughter did not want to leave London, her many friends, and her Art, so she stayed on in England. Shortly afterwards we got married and set up a studio together. I took up 'black and white' work as a readier means of making money than picture painting, and it was at this time, when I had often to sit up late into the night at my easel to get some work done, that my wife fell into the habit of reading aloud to me, mostly French detective novels, Gaboriau and others, and I think it was originally from these -- that are classics in their way -- that she learnt how to set out and construct a story.

Later on we happened to come across a family consisting of father, mother, and two daughters. The latter wrote short stories for the magazines -- we did not think very highly of them, but sometimes passed an evening listening to one or other of them reading her 'latest' aloud. One night after such a reading my wife said to me, "I could write better stories than those girls," and I said, "Well! why not have a try?" No sooner said than done; the very next day I found her armed with pen, ink and paper scribbling for all she was worth! Soon she had written two stories -- both of the thrilling kind, and when she'd read them to me I ejaculated, 'Damned good!'

I happened to be doing work for Pearson's Magazine at the time, and said I'd take her stories and show them to the editor. I did so, and he promised to read them the next day -- which was Sunday. On Monday morning a telegram was handed in -- not for me, but for my wife, from the Editor, and it said, 'Come to the office and lunch with me.' Off she went, and I stayed in the studio working and wondering what was happening at Pearson's office.

In the afternoon my wife turned up, fearfully excited. The Editor had not only accepted the stories, but commissioned her to write several more to make a series. These stories are known now, almost the world over, as The Old Man in the Corner series, and are selling in book form to this day!

Now I come to the Scarlet Pimpernel. It really is almost unbelievable, but this is just what happened. A magazine editor -- not Pearson's this time, but the Baroness' stories had by now found their way into other publications as well -- asked her to call at his office. She went off. It was a regular London day, foggy and damp, and I didn't like her going off by herself, but she would go: The Editor told her he had an opening for a long serial story, but it must be of a very exciting and 'romantic' character. My poor wife came away from the interview feeling despondent -- she had done nothing but detective fiction so far and said she hadn't a romantic idea in her head. As she paced up and down the platform at the Temple underground station -- waiting for a train -- the place wrapped in fog and mist, she suddenly looked up and saw The Scarlet Pimpernel! She stood rooted to the spot and simply stared -- he came towards her and laughed and looked at her through his quizzing glass -- he was dressed in his caped coat and wore breeches and hessian boots: he passed her and she turned to watched him, but he had disappeared! She came home nearly frantic with excitement. All she could say was, 'I've found him -- my Hero!'

So you see the Scarlet Pimpernel does, in all reality, take a quiz sometimes at our world of to-day. Our author has often seen him since, for to her eyes he takes visible shape -- in fact, he sometimes 'barges in' when she is writing on quite different subjects, nothing to do with him at all. She looks up and finds him sitting against the angle of her desk, looking at her and smiling and she says to him, 'I'm not writing about you now, my dear man.' And she sees him smile and say, 'Oh, you think not-but I'm not demmed sure of it!'

And sometimes when she is dozing in a chair in front of the fire after her day's work, she feels he is there and looks up and finds him laughing quietly and looking at her through his quizzing-glass -- and he begins without any preamble:

'Now, m'dear, I must tell you what happened on the 3rd Brumaire in 179-- I was in Paris, you know, by the Seine, and it was a demmed disagreeable sort of day'

And he just tells her the whole story so that she is compelled to write it down -- and that's how it happens.

You may believe it or not-but it's a fact!

Good-bye, and God bless you all.

Montagu Barstow