traitors had been spirited away from under his very nose by the devil's
agency, for surely that meddlesome Englishman who spent his time in
rescuing aristocrats--traitors, all of them--from the clutches of Madame
la Guillotine must be either the devil himself, or at any rate one of
his most powerful agents.

"Nom de Dieu! just think of his name! The Scarlet Pimpernel they call
him! No one knows him by any other name! and he is preternaturally tall
and strong and superhumanly cunning! And the power which he has of being
transmuted into various personalities--rendering himself quite
unrecognisable to the eyes of the most sharp-seeing patriot of France,
must of a surety be a gift of Satan!"

But the Committee of Public Safety refused to listen to Ferney's
explanations. The Scarlet Pimpernel was only an ordinary mortal--an
exceedingly cunning and meddlesome personage it is true, and endowed
with a superfluity of wealth which enabled him to break the thin crust
of patriotism that overlay the natural cupidity of many Captains of the
Town Guard--but still an ordinary man for all that! and no true lover of
the Republic should allow either superstitious terror or greed to
interfere with the discharge of his duties which at the Porte Montmartre
consisted in detaining any and every person--aristocrat, foreigner, or
otherwise traitor to the Republic--who could not give a satisfactory
reason for desiring to leave Paris. Having detained such persons, the
patriot's next duty was to hand them over to the Committee of Public
Safety, who would then decide whether Madame la Guillotine would have
the last word over them or not.

And the guillotine did nearly always have the last word to say, unless
the Scarlet Pimpernel interfered.