Scaramouche (Gateway Movie Classics)

The passionate Andre-Louis Moreau makes an unexpected entrance into the French Revolution when he vows to avenge his best friend's death. His target: Monsieur de La Tour d'Azyr, the aristocratic villain who killed his friend. Andre-Louis rallies the underclass to join him in his mission against the supreme power of the nobility. Soon the rebel leader must go underground, disguising himself as "Sacramouche" in a traveling group of actors. In the midst of his swashbuckling adventures and his country's revolution, he discovers the secret of his own identity.

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Thanks to that famous opening sentence the swaggering hero of "Scaramouche" bounds onto the book's center-stage with considerable panache. And for hardly a moment thereafter does André-Louis Moreau lose his charismatic cool, displaying at almost every turn in the tumultuous course of his picaresque adventures the verve, the wit, the intellectual and physical adroitness, and the instant mastery of circumstance that are his birthright. Thrust by chance into the turbulent politics of the time, his successive endeavors as a lawyer, politician, actor, lover, and buffoon make for corking entertainment. With colorful set-pieces playing against a backdrop of high historical drama, "Scaramouche" is considered by many to be Sabatini's best work.