Emma Orczy Emma Orczy Baroness Emma Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála "Emmuska" Orczy de Orci (; 23 September 1865 – 12 November 1947) was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright. She is best known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the alter ego of Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English fop who turns into a quick-thinking escape artist in order to save ill-fated French royalty from "Madame Guillotine" during the French revolution, establishing the "hero with a secret identity" into popular culture. Opening in London's West End on 5 January 1905, "The Scarlet Pimpernel" became a favourite of British
The Man with the Flower in His Mouth ("il fiore in bocca") and a peaceful businessman who has missed his train. In other words, between someone who intensely lives the little time left to him and someone who is rich with time to spend idly and irresponsibly, waiting for the morning train and entirely absorbed by the banal contretemps. The exceptional nature of the moment, for the man who feels death upon him—to use Pirandello's phrase—and the normality of it, for the one who is absorbed in the usual affairs of life with its small daily commitments, mark the two ends of the dialectic which is animated in