"This edition prints the first and only text of Mark Twain's masterpiece ever based on his complete manuscript - including its first 663 pages, half the book, lost for over a hundred years until discovered in 1990 in a Los Angeles attic. Using this newly restored manuscript, the editors have recovered thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation which were misread, "corrected," or simply overlooked by Mark Twain's "typewriter copyist"...

In 1792, during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, an English aristocrat known to be an ineffectual fop is actually a master of disguises who, with a small band of dedicated friends, undertakes dangerous missions to save members of the French nobility from the guillotine.