In Paris, that city of poets and soldiers, the blood-stained walls still echo with cries of horror from the massacres of the Revolution. And now a new threat hangs over the great city: for the Committee of General Security has just acquired full powers to invade private homes, to act at will against the "enemies of public welfare" -- and to interrogate them without witnesses. This new law, Robespierre's latest whim, is no less than a ruse to "beat up game" for the thirsty guillotine

News soon reaches the ears of that champion of the helpless and the innocent, the mysterious and ingenious Englishman known in France only as . . . the Scarlet Pimpernel.