The Laughing Cavalier: The Story of the Ancestor of the Scarlet Pimpernel

Set in Holland in 1623/1624, and published in 1913, The Laughing Cavalier, by the British novelist Baroness Orczy, revolves around Percy Blake, a foreign adventurer and ancestor of the Scarlet Pimpernel who goes by the name Diogenes who, we are told by Orczy, is the real subject of the famous painting The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals. The son of an English nobleman and a Dutch woman, his father abandoned his mother after Diogenes was born, and he was brought up by Hals in Haarlem. He has spent his life fighting in various battles as a mercenary for hire, but now, along with his two sidekicks - fellow 'philosophers' - Socrates and Pythagoras, he is back in Haarlem, penniless and looking for entertainment. The book is followed by The First Sir Percy. The book was promoted as "Hard riding, desperate fighting, romantic love, the flavor of olden days in the story of the ancestor of THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL".