Scaramouche

13 hrs. 14 min.

Language Russian

Author Rafael Sabatini

Narrator Sergey Kirsanov

Description

At the heart of Raphael Sabatini’s novel “Scaramouche” (1921) lies the full of adventure and danger life of André-Louis Muraud, a young French lawyer who, by sheer chance, finds himself attached to a traveling theatrical troupe and becomes an actor performing under the mask of Scaramouche (a boastful swaggerer in the Italian commedia dell’arte), and then—during years of public upheaval—turns into a revolutionary, a politician, and a seasoned duelist. Endowed by nature with “an acute sense of the ridiculous and an innate feeling that the world is mad” (these words later became the epitaph carved on Sabatini’s tombstone), a brilliant orator, gifted performer, and unmatched fencer, André-Louis, during the Great French Revolution, enters into confrontation with powerful men. The twists of the revolutionary era bring the hero once again face-to-face with his old adversary (and rival in love), the Marquis de Latour d’Azyr—who once killed André-Louis’s friend in a duel—and this meeting suddenly reveals to André-Louis, who had always believed he was the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a simple Breton peasant girl, the startling truth about his origins…