When writing a review of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, it’s almost obligatory to quote the first line, often considered one of the best in English literature:

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.

(I added the second line as a bonus, because I’m in a generous mood.)

Rafael Sabatini is chiefly remembered today as the author of Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, which had the good fortune to be turned into classic movies starring Errol Flynn. Scaramouche has been filmed twice, once as a silent with Ramon Navarro, and once in sound and technicolor with Stewart Granger. Granger isn’t quite up to Flynn’s standards as a swashbuckler, and the film is pretty radically telescoped from the book’s plot, but I understand it’s not bad. Haven’t seen it myself in a while.

“Scaramouche” is not the hero’s real name, but the name he takes on when he joins a traveling comedy troupe. Stage comedy in those days, only slightly evolved from the Italian Commedia del Arte, was kind of like a TV situation comedy, if there were many networks and they all broadcast the same series, just with different casts playing the roles. The stock characters, recycled from plot to plot, became familiar types. We still speak of Harlequin and Pantaloon today, and occasionally you may even dig up a reference to Peirrot and Columbine. Scaramouche was another such character, a shifty, black-clad figure who was constantly devising plots and conspiracies. The trick of this novel (and Sabatini carries it off very well) is that his hero, Andre-Louis Moreau of Brittany, is a Scaramouche in real life as well as on stage. And the book’s plot is clearly based on a standard comedy plot of the time. Even the climax is technically right out of the Comedie Francais, except that it’s handled with far greater restraint and ambiguity.

Andre-Louis becomes an actor in order to hide from the law, after he delivers a revolutionary speech in the city of Nantes which (to his own surprise) becomes one of the sparks that sets off the French Revolution. He gives the speech, not because he’s a revolutionary himself, but as a sort of tribute to a friend who has just been murdered in duel by a nobleman, the arrogant Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr. Andre-Louis has vowed to promote his friend’s ideas and to kill the Marquis.

He finds that he has a natural gift for acting, and before long becomes not only the star, but the business manager, of the theater company. But a disappointing romantic interlude with the other manager’s daughter, plus a further brush with the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, causes him to leave the theater and become a fencing master’s assistant. Eventually, once he has perfected his swordsmanship, he goes into politics, sitting on the left side of the National Assembly, in order to get his final revenge on his mortal enemy.

The whole thing is rather preposterous, in the best tradition of the picaresque novel, but Sabatini carries it off with great style. As old books are wont to do, Scaramouche starts a little slow, but the longer I read the more fascinated I grew. This is a classic adventure story, well worth re-discovering.

Recommended for anyone old enough to understand the grammar.