Lost Classic: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” Those words, accompanied by a sculpture of a man lying prone with a pen still held in his hand, supply the epitaph on the grave of novelist Rafael Sabatini at Adelboden in Switzerland. They are the opening sentence of his most accomplished novel, Scaramouche.

A couple of generations ago that introductory line was as familiar to the reading public as “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” Today it is more the preserve of a devoted minority of enthusiasts, but it is probably an exaggeration to describe Sabatini as a lost classic; he simply enjoys a diminished readership. His works are all still in print, largely thanks to Stratus Books which in the early years of this century republished the entire canon – thirty-seven volumes – now available on Amazon and similar outlets.

The essential epithet invariably applied to Rafael Sabatini is “swashbuckling”. Before examining his life and work, therefore, it might be opportune to put it in context by examining the character and genesis of this literary genre. Like so much of the European romantic literary tradition it traces its remote origins to Sir Walter Scott. Thereafter, a school of novel-writing evolved that combined a vivid historical background with high adventure.

Alexandre Dumas père was the doyen of this genre, dating from the publication of The Three Musketeers in 1844. Such was his staggering output that the entire cycle of Musketeer sequels, the Valois novels and The Count of Monte Cristo were all published in the single decade of the 1840s. Dumas’ closest rival Paul Féval asserted his position as a writer of swashbucklers with his bestselling novel Le Bossu, in 1857, but preferred to produce crime fiction.

In the 1880s Scotland, which had arguably invented the historical novel genre, contributed to the canon Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae). The first was regarded as juvenile fiction and the contempt of literary authors such as Virginia Woolf, whose own work could scarcely be described as pulse-racing, deprived Stevenson of due recognition for decades.

In England, the last decade of the 19^th century was the golden age of swashbuckling authors. They included Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda, Rupert of Hentzau) and Stanley J Weyman (A Gentleman of France, Under the Red Robe, The Red Cockade). These were followed at the turn of the century by A E W Mason (Clementina, The Four Feathers) and Baroness Orczy who launched the Scarlet Pimpernel on his hazardous adventures in 1905 and continued to chronicle Sir Percy Blakeney through twelve novels and two collections of short stories until 1940.

As the new century began, so, very tentatively, did the career of the man who was to take historical fiction to a new peak of popularity and literary achievement. Rafael Sabatini was, on the face of it, the unlikeliest candidate for this role. English was his sixth language, though his mature prose style was superior to many of his English-born literary contemporaries.

Sabatini was born on 29 April, 1875 in Italy, at Jesi near Ancona. His parents were both opera singers who turned to music teaching, his father being Italian and his mother English. Since the record of his parents’ marriage has eluded researchers some have speculated he may have been illegitimate, though there is no obvious reason why that should have been the case. His parents were both established in a respected profession: his father Vincenzo trained the famous tenor John, Count McCormack in Milan in 1905. Such speculation, however, has been aggravated by the prominence of illegitimacy as a theme in several of Sabatini’s novels.

Rafael, after a cosmopolitan education in Portugal and Switzerland which made him multi-lingual, ended up in Liverpool where his mother had relations, eventually scraping a living as a journalist. His early stories were published in magazines and newspapers which researchers are still trying to track down today. In 1902 his first novel The Lovers of Yvonne was published, to an indifferent reception. The aspiring author struggled on.

In 1906 he published two historical novels, very different in character. One was The Trampling of the Lilies, Sabatini’s first ambitious attempt to mine the French Revolution for material. Compared to a later novel in the same setting, Scaramouche, it is stylistically awkward, veering perilously close to the “Nay, sir, that love can never be!” school of Victorian melodramatic dialogue. The writer being Sabatini, it never quite falls into that abyss, but it is decidedly inferior to his later productions.

In contrast, the other novel he published that same year, Bardelys the Magnificent, moves with pace and aplomb, somewhat in the style of his later Captain Blood short stories. The evident reason for this disparity is that Sabatini had been reworking The Trampling of the Lilies from earlier material, the short story Mademoiselle de Castelroc which had appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in January 1904 and so was probably written in 1903. The lengthy transition from short story to novel, in the hands of a still apprentice writer, explains its lack of literary felicity.

Sabatini diligently produced one novel every year, except once, until the outbreak of the Great War, making a very modest living while the breakthrough he dreamed of continued to elude him. In 1915 he published the first novel that would later be ranked as part of his classic canon – The Sea Hawk – but without notable public success at the time. Then his writing career was disrupted by the War, as his linguistic skills caused British intelligence to recruit him as a translator.

During the remainder of the war years he produced only one novel, The Snare, in 1917 and then no further full-length work until 1921. That exceptional fallow period did not betoken any decline in his writing skills or dedication to his profession. On the contrary, Sabatini was engaged in his supreme effort of creativity and in 1921, aged 46, he published the masterpiece that would change his life and elevate him to a higher literary plane: his novel Scaramouche.

It is believed that part of the plot for Scaramouche came to Sabatini while he was translating a history of the Comédie-Française. He himself described its earliest genesis in a contribution to The Strand Magazine. After explaining that the inspiration for his novels did not follow a set pattern (“Sometimes I begin by conceiving a situation, sometimes a single character, and sometimes I am attracted by a particular background”) he went on to disclose: “In one instance I began by fastening upon a title, ‘Scaramouche’, and almost simultaneously came the phrase descriptive of the character: ‘He was born with the [sic] gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.’ That supplied the opening line and the keynote of the book.”

Scaramouche is the chronicle of André-Louis Moreau, a spirited youth of unknown paternity but brought up by his godfather, a Breton nobleman, in pre-Revolutionary France. He witnesses his closest friend being killed in an unequal duel by the reactionary Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr, an incident that changes the whole tenor of his life, embracing the disparate worlds of a company of strolling players (as in Féval’s Le Bossu), the fencing salle and eventually the political turmoil of the Estates General and National Assembly.

To supply further detail would create spoilers for those who may not have read this excellent novel but might enjoy doing so. To class it as “swashbuckling” is to ignore its vast scope, deep characterization and philosophical depth. The romance of the sword is, however, a significant component. The reality is that, not only in the works of Sabatini but in those of other swashbuckling authors, passages of swordplay are relatively intermittent. In the Sabatini oeuvre the Captain Blood books are the ones in which action is most predominant.

The image of the historical fiction genre as one of permanently clashing steel derives from the cinema, where the imperative for unrelenting audience stimulation dictates that, in virtually every frame, the chief protagonist must be grasping either a sword or a woman.

Sabatini followed up the huge success of Scaramouche the following year with an equally popular novel, Captain Blood: His Odyssey. Its success prompted him to write two books of short stories based on the same character: The Chronicles of Captain Blood, in 1931, and The Fortunes of Captain Blood, in 1936. Both collections were strikingly atmospheric and demonstrated Sabatini’s skill as a writer of short stories, a talent not always exhibited by novelists, since the two disciplines are very different.

In 1931 Sabatini attempted to exploit his success of a decade earlier by writing a sequel: Scaramouche the Kingmaker. Although it illustrated his exceptional dedication to historical research and ability to ferret out plots from real-life conspiracies, in this book Sabatini fell victim to the very literary skill with which he had crafted his greatest novel. The problem was that Scaramouche was too perfectly complete for the reader to live comfortably with a sequel grafted onto it.

Rafael Sabatini continued to write until his death, though less prolifically. One of his best novels was written in 1940: The Marquis of Carabas, also titled Master-At-Arms. In this book he returned to the themes of fencing and the French Revolution. Although the genre of historical fiction is not simply one long duel, swordsmanship is a significant element in the Sabatini canon and the author knew the lore of the sword, a knowledge he displayed most forensically in The Marquis of Carabas.

The same could not be said of many other swashbuckling authors. Paul Féval was ignorant of fencing: the supposed botte secrète of the Duc de Nevers in Le Bossu could never have been executed in a real swordfight.

So, does Rafael Sabatini deserve to be categorized as a classic? The irony is that, if he had been a one-book author and had produced only Scaramouche it would almost certainly have been accepted as a literary novel. Accompanied as it is by thirty other novels and nine collections of shorter tales, all of widely varying quality, even that rightful classic is too easily written off by critics as mere adventure fiction.

In compensation, Sabatini attained fame and fortune. His life, however, was clouded by tragedy. In defiance of the cliché that lightning does not strike in the same place twice, he witnessed the violent deaths of his son in a road accident and his stepson in an air crash, while flying over his parents’ home to celebrate having earned his wings in the RAF in the Second World War. The writer’s consolations were fishing and skiing in Switzerland, where Sabatini died in 1950.

Sabatini still inspires many followers and there is a well-researched and informative website devoted to the study of his writing, entitled The Life and Work of Rafael Sabatini. The decade following his death saw a huge revival of the swashbuckling genre, led by the cinema. In 1950 The Fortunes of Captain Blood came to the screen, followed by a parodic version of Scaramouche in 1952, redeemed only by the duel in the finale – the longest swordfight in cinema history, between Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer.

In reaction to the industrial scale of slaughter in the Second World War and the menace of the atomic bomb, the 1950s witnessed a large-scale re-popularization of swashbuckling adventures in cinema and comics, with the happy consequence that many books were also republished. That reaction has long since subsided, but the genre is still alive today, most notably in the Captain Alatriste series of novels by the Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

One final observation should be made regarding the writers of swashbuckling fiction: they were mostly untrue to their fictional totems. Dumas took a rather ineffectual, even comical, part in the 1830 revolution that finally brought down the Bourbon monarchy his created protagonists had revered and served, ushering in a bourgeois king who carried not a sword but an umbrella.

The English authors had a Whiggish mentality, most obviously Stanley J Weyman whose Protestant self-righteousness could become tedious. He was the writer Sabatini most admired. Sabatini embraced the values of his English mother’s homeland, demonizing James II and perpetuating the Black Legend of Spanish beastliness in many of his novels. The epigraph preceding Scaramouche, a quotation from Michelet the anticlerical republican historian, offers an apologist’s view of the French Revolution.

The problem with creating sword-wielding heroes who are on the side of “progressive” forces that will eventually produce republics and mass democracy is that those paladins are destroying their natural habitat. Even Rafael Sabatini did not grasp that irony; in compensation, he left a large body of well-researched and graphically atmospheric fiction populated with credible, heroic and witty characters that has brought pleasure over more than a century to millions of readers and deserves to be re-read today.