Scaramouche

After Captain Blood, I decided to give Sabatini another try and read Scaramouche.

I definitely learned more reading this book than the prior one, whose background material was well-known to me. I had never really encountered the Italian theatrical tradition commedia dell'arte on which it draws so heavily (including for its title). The form uses stock characters who, instead of having lines, are put into scenarios and asked to improvise a performance that is different every time. Because the stock characters are well known to the audience and have obvious costumes to designate their role, the audience can quickly ascertain the motivations at work on stage and understand the comedy. 

Sabatini decided to draw heavily on this for his own storytelling. He regularly refers to a character as being "a Rhodomont" or "our Pantaloon" in order to convey to his audience what role to expect them to play. This conveys nothing but confusion until you study the form enough to have some notion of who those stock character are. A Scaramouche is a 'skirmisher,' one who engages in or provokes fights but then flees from them -- somewhat like the little dog that will start a fight among the big dogs and then go hide while they have it out. 

I shall put the rest after the jump, to avoid spoilers in case any of you want to read the work.

For most of the book, the protagonist is thus not very praiseworthy. In this he has a real character arc, unlike Peter Blood whose character is basically unchanged throughout. The only major change in Blood is that he begins as a nonpartisan in the matter of the Stewart kings and becomes a staunch partisan against them due to the injustice he suffers. Yet his essential character does not change; he was always the sort of man who would be incensed by being treated with monstrous injustice. 

Our Scaramouche changes greatly over the course of the novel. He begins as a man who has a cynical view of the great ideals of the Revolutionary age, so much so that he mocks them until he is almost thrown out of his book group. (Apparently an important institution in pre-Revolutionary France, these groups spread the ideas that eventually flowered into the events of 1789.) He is radicalized when one of his friends, an eloquent man who does believe, is bailed into a duel and then killed by a nobleman. The scene was striking to me because I could see exactly where Sabatini was going with it; the insult was calculated, the passionate response obviously provoked, and the challenge to the duel its intended outcome. Our Scaramouche was appalled to watch his friend killed by a master swordsman whom he had no hope of resisting. 

Longtime readers of the Hall have heard me talk about the institution of dueling at great length. Sabatini is using it at cross-purposes to mine here. He is ultimately going to endorse the Revolutionary view that aristocratic privilege was immoral and evil, and that human equality was an ideal worth dying or killing to attain. Yet the duel is principally about equality, as I have argued: it required you to account to another for your words or actions, and to do so on terms of fairness and equality. You had to give him an honest shot at killing you, precisely because he was your equal and had the right to resent certain forms of disrespect. 

Sabatini occasionally raises the criticism that the proletariat in this struggle is not profiting from it, but being crushed by the bourgeoisie's desire to use 'equality' to blur the differences between themselves and the nobles. Yet the fact that a noble would use a duel in this way shows that, in this most important sense, the French had already accepted that the bourgeoise were entitled to be treated as equals. Otherwise they should have been caned (a threat that is raised later in the book); but also free from the threat of being 'assassinated' in a duel, because no one would expect a non-gentleman to fight a duel. Their challenges would be rejected, and their insults dealt with outside of the institution.

This points to a key difference in the duel as an American institution. The American code duello specified that pistols and not swords were to be used as a rule. The reason was precisely to enforce the leveling equality of firearms, so that a nobleman trained his whole life in the sword should have no mortal advantage over a lawyer or a shopkeeper. In France, the duel was nearly always with swords, a matter that becomes very important in the third act of the book when our Scaramouche ends up becoming a swordsman of quality. He ends up effectively guilty of the same thing that had incensed him about the Marquis who killed his friend, regularly provoking challenges so that he can kill or gravely injure political opponents. 

All of this is part of the character's significant arc. Having begun as a cynic, he becomes a passionate advocate of Revolution: but at first not a convicted but still a cynical one. He does it not because he believes in it, but because he realizes it might be an effective way of striking back at the nobleman who is his enemy. He continues to use his gift of rhetoric instrumentally for a long time, but in time he comes to believe in many of the claims. He abandons his principles against using the duel to assassinate in order to advance the principles he adopts; but at least he is not provoking riots in an attempt to assassinate his enemies. 

Ironically our Scaramouche ultimately ends up abandoning the Revolution in order to join the nobility. By chance he becomes an assistant instructor at a fencing academy, rising to great skill through constant practice and study of the library of fencing manuals. He inherits the mastery of the academy, raising him to a title considered honorable even by the nobility: "Maitre en fait d’Armes," who literally lives by the sword in a way that was the ancient root of nobility, though most of them had long passed out of making their actual living that way. His rise to power is based on his mastery of this skill, fencing, that is the mark of the noblity. His dress becomes noble; he wears a silver-hilted sword. In the end he discovers that his bastardy was the result of two high nobles, so that he is literally of noble birth; and he chooses his family, including his long-desired wife (appropriately for the class, a cousin of his) against the very Revolution that had raised him to power.

Finally, then, he ends up remaining a Scaramouche: at the end, he flees the fight he helped to start, escaping France to fly with the survivors of the Court to Austria. He ends up abandoning the revolutionary ideals, and marrying one of the daughters of the nobility (we presume: as in Captain Blood, the romance is almost entirely played out as a series of misunderstandings and longings, with confession of love coming only on the very last page of the book). Indeed, his sexual morality -- his and hers -- is entirely that of the high nobility as Sabatini understands it. Both end up consenting to other marriages they do not complete because of the failure of their intended to live up to their ideals of purity.

It is a more interesting book than Captain Blood, though I like the protagonist less. Except in his aristocratic sexual morality he is constantly confused and inconstant in the principles he adopts or abandons; only in his pure and perfect love is he constant and ultimately faithful. Yet, as Malory says of Lancelot and Guinevere, because he was a true lover he at last comes to a good end -- or as close to one as Malory, himself, might have recognized. His true noble birth uncovered, his true love realized, his capacity for martial prowess actualized, he ends up attached to the well-born and among the friends of royalty. It is a strange ending given the story, but it is a strange story too.