Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel successfully pleaded with her husband not to take the traitorous Lord Kulmsted (see 'The Traitor' in The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel) on his latest mission. Several members of the league would have liked to extend the prohibition to young Lord Fanshawe, who, despite a keen start, is wilful & obstinate – an inveterate gambler who is apt to turn very nasty if matters don't go the way he desires. Fanshawe has, for several years, been in love with Aline, the daughter of The Comte d'Ercourt, whom he first met before the revolution when she was a child of sixteen.
Romantic hero love interest, him or herself victimised by the hero's rebellious tendencies, with their fates intertwined for decades, sometimes from their youths to their deaths. (See Tatyana Larina, Elizabeth Bennet, Eugenie Grandet, et al.) The Romantic hero first began appearing in literature during the Romantic period, in works by such authors as Byron, Keats, Goethe, and Pushkin, and is seen in part as a response to the French Revolution. As Napoleon, the "living model of a hero", became a disappointment to many, the typical notion of the hero as upholding social order began to be challenged. Classic literary examples of the