Castles in the Air

This is a biography of Ratichon Hector, written by Baroness Orczy. In presenting this engaging rogue in this book, Baroness Orczy apologizes to the readers for attempting to enlist sympathy in favor of a man who has little to recommend him to save his unconscious humor. Horse in this text describes her good friend Ratichon as an unblushing liar, thief, a forger—anything you will; his vanity is past belief, and his scruples are non-existent. How he escaped a convict settlement is difficult to imagine, and hard to realize that he died—presumably some years after the event recorded in the last chapter of his autobiography—a respected member of the community, honored by that same society that should have raised a punitive hand against him. Yet this she believes to be the case. At any rate, despite close research in the police records of the period, she finds no mention of Hector Ratichon. «Heureux Le Peuple qui n'a pas d'histoire» applies, therefore, to him, and we must take it that Fate and his own sorely troubled country dealt lightly with him.