Louis The Baker XVI has battled the National Barber and lost. André (Scaramouche) has switched sides. The royalists in exile are planning a new revolution. Nonetheless, the novel gets off to a slow start. A myriad of name-dropping and motives are tossed at the reader. Lacking a detailed knowledge of French history, be prepared to be bored to death if you plod on or to abandon all hope of sorting fact from fiction. Anyway, Scaramouche now sets out to rescue the Queen of Bake Sales: an attempt that we know will fail. However, his plot is quite different from that of Dumas (See The Chevalier de Maison Rouge). Undeterred, he continues his machinations to discredit the leaders of the National Convention. So he nearly succeeds in bringing down the radical hypocrites who rule France. Well, we leave those who remain to destroy each other. In the end the Republicans are as corrupt as the monarchy. Has anything changed?

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