#but the line about marguerite seeing herself as someone incapable of love was just really relatable

[senadimell]

Many unformulated thoughts about The Scarlet Pimpernel, but one key point about the core relationship that was really striking to me:

It was never Percy’s intelligence that Marguerite was attracted to. It was the fact that he was utterly devoted to her.

So there’s a line in the book that says something to the effect of “she’d never been in love before and didn’t think it was something that would happen to her. She figured she was just not a person capable of loving.” But then Percy shows up and adores her, and she doesn’t necessarily reciprocate right away, but she enjoys being loved and goes along with things.

Importantly, Marguerite is established as extremely intelligent from the beginning. Percy is...not. Even before he leans into foppish shallowness, people are willing to believe he’s not sharp. There’s a discussion of his mother and Sir Percy inheriting ‘madness’ that suggests people are willing to believe he has an intellectual disability, though obviously there’s different terminology being used given the time period.

While Percy turns out to be an intellectual match for his wife, it’s not his intelligence that Marguerite falls in love with. She doesn’t bemoan how clever he used to be—she laments how he used to love her.

This is important.

Marguerite thinks he cannot comprehend how she was entrapped into betraying people to death, and while at least some of this belief in his slow-mindedness may have developed after the fact, it was still rooted in a sincere belief that he was unable to comprehend the situation that she was in, and his inability to understand broke his love for her because he believes her to be a murderer. However, while she does grow disillusioned with his foolish behavior and apparent lack of intellect, she’s not mourning the intelligent man who courted her. She’s mourning a man, perhaps a simple man, but an honest one who she thought she could grow to love.

As for Percy, his falling-out with Marguerite happens because he had to find out how about her role in an execution from other people, and then when he turned to her for an explanation, she offered none. He loved her and he hoped for some emotional intimacy or confidence in return, but instead, she closed herself off and he’s hurt and offended.

Then it all goes downhill, because as he closes himself off and cultivates an overly foolish reputation, she starts to hurt him in the hopes that it will provoke some emotional reaction. If he can’t love her, maybe he can hate her (which is cruel, ridiculous logic but pretty human). Percy responds to this by hiding every scrap of emotion and never rising to the bait, always allowing her to make a fool of him, and never fighting back, and in private, he goes to the aid of French nobility without even dreaming of confiding in his wife. Meanwhile, she snipes at him and secretly despairs until she is truly trapped and finds herself utterly without confidante.

Why does this matter? Because the Scarlet Pimpernel is a romantic superhero that all the women love. If someone falls in love with Superman while being a-okay trashing Clark Kent, it’s going to be hard to accept that love as genuine. It’s really important to the story that Marguerite falls in love with Percy again before she ever realizes he’s the Scarlet Pimpernel and before she realizes how clever he actually is.

“Rather did I speak of a time when you loved me still! and I...oh! I was vain and frivolous; your wealth and position allured me: I married you, hoping in my heart that your great love for me would beget in me a love for you...but, alas!”

and then, later on:

The lazy, good-natured face looked strangely altered. Marguerite, excited as she was, could see that the eyes were no longer languid, the mouth no longer good humored and inane. A curious look of intense passion seemed to glow from beneath his drooping lids, the mouth was tightly closed, the lips compressed, as if the will alone held that surging passion in check.

Marguerite Blakeney was, above all, a woman, with all a woman’s fascinating foibles, all a woman’s most lovable sins. She knew in a moment that for the past few months she had been mistake: that this man who stood here before her, cold as a statue, when her musical voice struck upon his ear, loved her, as he had loved her a year ago: that his passion might have been dormant, but that it was there, as strong, as intense, as overwhelming, as when first her lips met his in one long, maddening kiss. Pride had kept him from her, and, woman-like, she meant to win back that conquest from which had been hers before. Suddenly it seemed to her that the only happiness life could every hold for her again would be in feeling that man’s kiss once more upon her lips.

Percy does happen to be the intellectual equal to his wife. But that’s not how he wooed her. 

I guess the really important thing to me here is that Marguerite was really awful to Percy, and she realizes it and regrets it, and tries to make amends before she ever realizes her husband is a dashing superhero. Heck, she asks for help protecting her brother and believes he'll be able to make things okay even before learning of his secret identity. She’s willing to love him even when he’s still slow Sir Percy Blakeney. It’s not his intellect or lack thereof that offends her, but their total lack of emotional intimacy (that started with her), and she’s willing to overcome the gulf between them by being vulnerable first.