English · Intermediate
Read The Scarlet Pimpernel in Englishwith every sentence explained
Baroness Orczy · 1905
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About the book
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy was first published in 1905. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction, romance and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 85,500 words.
They seek him here, they seek him there. No one knows who he is.
Paris, 1792. The Reign of Terror is at its height, and every day French aristocrats are sent to the guillotine. Yet again and again, condemned families vanish from under the noses of the guards, rescued by a band of daring Englishmen led by a mysterious hero who signs his notes with a small red flower: the Scarlet Pimpernel.
In London, the beautiful Marguerite Blakeney, once the star of the Paris stage, is married to Sir Percy, a rich, foppish baronet more interested in fashion than anything else. When the ruthless French agent Chauvelin threatens her beloved brother's life, Marguerite is forced into a terrible bargain: help him unmask the Pimpernel.
Baroness Orczy's swashbuckling 1905 adventure created the hero with a secret identity — a direct ancestor of Zorro and Batman.
- Author
- Baroness Orczy
- First published
- 1905
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 85,500 words
How it opens
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.
Reading The Scarlet Pimpernel in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
