The Scarlet Pimpernel

When Baroness Emmuska Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), little did she know she was creating the super hero genre.
Who is the elusive and mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel? A master of clever disguises, stealth and elegant escapes -- skills that he uses to rescue doomed French aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. His signature -- a tiny scarlet flower.
The Pimpernel's true identity is unknown except to a small group of co-conspirators who work with him and together comprise the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Not even his wife, the beautiful Lady Marguerite Blakeney, knows that the man she is married to, an effete fop and dull-witted British dandy Sir Percy Blakeney, is a secret hero who risks his life on a daily basis in order to save countless others.