Prince Zilah | Page 6

the river, and crossed the plank
to the boat, with little coquettish graces and studied raising of the skirts,
allowing ravishing glimpses of pretty feet and ankles. The defile of
merry, witty Parisiennes, with their attendant cavaliers, while the
orchestra played the passionate notes of the Hungarian czardas,
resembled some vision of a painter, some embarkation for the
dreamed-of Cythera, realized by the fancy of an artist, a poet, or a great
lord, here in nineteenth century Paris, close to the bridge, across which
streamed, like a living antithesis, the realism of crowded cabs, full
omnibuses, and hurrying foot-passengers.
Prince Andras Zilah had invited his friends, this July morning, to a
breakfast in the open air, before the moving panorama of the banks of
the Seine.
Very well known in Parisian society, which he had sought eagerly with
an evident desire to be diverted, like a man who wishes to forget, the
former defender of Hungarian independence, the son of old Prince

Zilah Sandor, who was the last, in 1849, to hold erect the tattered
standard of his country, had been prodigal of his invitations,
summoning to his side his few intimate friends, the sharers of his
solitude and his privacy, and also the greater part of those chance
fugitive acquaintances which the life of Paris inevitably gives, and
which are blown away as lightly as they appeared, in a breath of air or a
whirlwind.
Count Yanski Varhely, the oldest, strongest, and most devoted friend of
all those who surrounded the Prince, knew very well why this fanciful
idea had come to Andras. At forty-four, the Prince was bidding farewell
to his bachelor life: it was no folly, and Yanski saw with delight that
the ancient race of the Zilahs, from time immemorial servants of
patriotism and the right, was not to be extinct with Prince Andras.
Hungary, whose future seemed brightening; needed the Zilahs in the
future as she had needed them in the past.
"I have only one objection to make to this marriage," said Varhely; "it
should have taken place sooner." But a man can not command his heart
to love at a given hour. When very young, Andras Zilah had cared for
scarcely anything but his country; and, far from her, in the bitterness of
exile, he had returned to the passion of his youth, living in Paris only
upon memories of his Hungary. He had allowed year after year to roll
by, without thinking of establishing a home of his own by marriage. A
little late, but with heart still warm, his spirit young and ardent, and his
body strengthened rather than worn out by life, Prince Andras gave to a
woman's keeping his whole being, his soul with his name, the one as
great as the other. He was about to marry a girl of his own choice,
whom he loved romantically; and he wished to give a surrounding of
poetic gayety to this farewell to the past, this greeting to the future. The
men of his race, in days gone by, had always displayed a gorgeous,
almost Oriental originality: the generous eccentricities of one of Prince
Andras's ancestors, the old Magyar Zilah, were often cited; he it was
who made this answer to his stewards, when, figures in hand, they
proved to him, that, if he would farm out to some English or German
company the cultivation of his wheat, corn, and oats, he would increase
his revenue by about six hundred thousand francs a year:

"But shall I make these six hundred thousand francs from the
nourishment of our laborers, farmers, sowers, and gleaners? No,
certainly not; I would no more take that money from the poor fellows
than I would take the scattered grains from the birds of the air."
It was also this grandfather of Andras, Prince Zilah Ferency, who,
when he had lost at cards the wages of two hundred masons for an
entire year, employed these men in constructing chateaux, which he
burned down at the end of the year to give himself the enjoyment of
fireworks upon picturesque ruins.
The fortune of the Zilahs was then on a par with the almost fabulous,
incalculable wealth of the Esterhazys and Batthyanyis. Prince Paul
Esterhazy alone possessed three hundred and fifty square leagues of
territory in Hungary. The Zichys, the Karolyis and the Szchenyis,
poorer, had but two hundred at this time, when only six hundred
families were proprietors of six thousand acres of Hungarian soil, the
nobles of Great Britain possessing not more than five thousand in
England. The Prince of Lichtenstein entertained for a week the
Emperor of Austria, his staff and his army. Old Ferency Zilah would
have done as much if he had not always cherished a profound, glowing,
militant hatred of Austria: never had the