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Prince Zilah -- Volume 1 by Jules Claretie
"Excuse me, Monsieur, but pray tell me what vessel that is over there."
The question was addressed to a small, dark man, who, leaning upon the parapet of the Quai des Tuileries, was rapidly writing in a note-book with a large combination pencil, containing a knife, a pen, spare leads, and a paper-cutter-all the paraphernalia of a reporter accustomed to the expeditions of itinerant journalism.
When he had filled, in his running hand, a leaf of the book, the little man tore it hastily off, and extended it to a boy in dark blue livery with silver buttons, bearing the initial of the newspaper, L'Actualite; and then, still continuing to write, he replied:
"Prince Andras Zilah is giving a fete on board one of the boats belonging to the Compagnie de la Seine."
"A fete? Why?"
"To celebrate his approaching marriage, Monsieur."
"Prince Andras! Ah!" said the first speaker, as if he knew the name well; "Prince Andras is to be married, is he? And who does Prince Andras Zil-"
"Zilah! He is a Hungarian, Monsieur."
The reporter appeared to be in a hurry, and, handing another leaf to the boy, he said:
"Wait here a moment. I am going on board, and I will send you the rest of the list of guests by a sailor. They can prepare the article from what you have, and set it up in advance, and I will come myself to the office this evening and make the necessary additions."
"Very well, Monsieur Jacquemin."
"And don't lose any of the leaves."
"Oh, Monsieur Jacquemin! I never lose anything!"
"They will have some difficulty, perhaps, in reading the names-they are all queer; but I shall correct the proof myself."
"Then, Monsieur," asked the lounger again, eager to obtain all the information he could, "those people who are going on board are almost all foreigners?"
"Yes, Monsieur; yes, Monsieur; yes, Monsieur!" responded jacquemin, visibly annoyed. "There are many foreigners in the city, very many; and I prefer them, myself, to the provincials of Paris."
The other did not seem to understand; but he smiled, thanked the reporter, and strolled away from the parapet, telling all the people he met: "It is a fete! Prince Andras, a Hungarian, is about to be married. Prince Andras Zilah! A fete on board a steamer! What a droll idea!"
Others, equally curious, leaned over the Quai des Tuileries and watched the steamer, whose tricolor flag at the stern, and red streamers at the mastheads, floated with gay flutterings in the fresh morning breeze. The boat was ready to start, its decks were waxed, its benches covered with brilliant stuffs, and great masses of azaleas and roses gave it the appearance of a garden or conservatory. There was something highly attractive to the loungers on the quay in the gayly decorated steamer, sending forth long puffs of white smoke along the bank. A band of dark- complexioned musicians, clad in red trousers, black waistcoats heavily embroidered in sombre colors, and round fur caps, played odd airs upon the deck; while bevies of laughing women, almost all pretty in their light summer gowns, alighted from coupes and barouches, descended the flight of steps leading to 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 family of the magnate submitted to Germany, become the master, any more than it had bent the knee in former times to the conquering Turk.
From his ancestors Prince Andras inherited, therefore, superb liberality, with a fortune greatly diminished by all sorts of losses and misfortunes -half of it confiscated by Austria in 1849, and enormous sums expended for the national cause, Hungarian emigrants and proscribed compatriots. Zilah nevertheless remained very rich, and was an imposing figure in Paris, where, some years before, after long journeyings, he had taken up his abode.
The little fete given for his friends on board the Parisian steamer was a trifling matter to the descendant of the magnificent Magyars; but still there was a certain charm about the affair, and it was a pleasure for the Prince to see upon the garden-like deck the amusing, frivolous, elegant society, which was the one he mingled with, but which he towered above from the height of his great intelligence, his conscience, and his convictions. It was a mixed and bizarre society, of different nationalities; an assemblage of exotic personages, such as are met with only in Paris in certain peculiar places where aristocracy touches Bohemianism, and nobles mingle with quasi-adventurers; a kaleidoscopic society, grafting its vices upon Parisian follies, coming to inhale the aroma and absorb the poison of Paris, adding thereto strange intoxications, and forming, in the immense agglomeration of the old French city, a sort of peculiar syndicate, an odd colony, which belongs to Paris, but which, however, has nothing of Paris about it except its eccentricities, which drive post-haste through life, fill the little journals with its great follies, is found and found again wherever Paris overflows-at Dieppe, Trouville, Vichy, Cauteret, upon the sands of Etretat, under the orange-trees of Nice, or about the gaming tables of Monaco, according to the hour, season, and fashion.
This was the sort of assemblage which, powdered, perfumed, exquisitely dressed, invaded, with gay laughter and nervous desire to be amused, the boat chartered by the Prince. Above, pencil in hand, the little dark man with the keen eyes, black, pointed beard and waxed moustache, continued to take down, as the cortege defiled before him, the list of the invited guests: and upon the leaves fell, briskly traced, names printed a hundred times a day in Parisian chronicles among the reports of the races of first representations at the theatres; names with Slav, Latin, or Saxon terminations; Italian names, Spanish, Hungarian, American names; each of which represented fortune, glory, power, sometimes scandal-one of those imported scandals which break out in Paris as the trichinae of foreign goods are hatched there.
The reporter wrote on, wrote ever, tearing off and handing to the page attached to 'L'Actualite' the last leaves of his list, whereon figured Yankee generals of the War of the Rebellion, Italian princesses, American girls flirting with everything that wore trousers; ladies who, rivals of Prince Zilah in wealth, owned whole counties somewhere in England; great Cuban lords, compromised in the latest insurrections and condemned to death in Spain; Peruvian statesmen, publicists, and military chiefs at once, masters of the tongue, the pen, and the revolver; a crowd of originals, even a Japanese, an elegant young man, dressed in the latest fashion, with a heavy sombrero which rested upon his straight, inky-black hair, and which every minute or two he took off and placed under his left arm, to salute the people of his acquaintance with low bows in the most approved French manner.
All these odd people, astonishing a little and interesting greatly the groups of Parisians gathered above on the sidewalks, crossed the gangway leading to the boat, and, spreading about on the deck, gazed at the banks and the houses, or listened to the czardas which the Hungarian musicians were playing with a sort of savage frenzy beneath the French tricolor united to the three colors of their own country.
The Tzigani thus saluted the embarkation of the guests; and the clear, bright sunshine enveloped the whole boat with a golden aureole, joyously illuminating the scene of feverish gayety and childish laughter.
Les Femmes de proie. Mademoiselle Cachemire by Jules Claretie
Veronica is an eighteen-year-old omega who falls into an emotional breakdown when her Mate, who was soon to be the Alpha of the Sun crest pack, turns against her, hurls hurtful words at her, and rejects her on the night of the full moon festival because he and everyone in the pack, including her, thinks she is an omega. As if the pain of rejection, helplessness, and worthlessness wasn't enough, she lost her best and only friend to the cold hands of death when rogue wolves attacked their pack. Right in the presence of her mate, she was tagged as someone who always attracted problems and calamities anywhere she went and he turned a blind eye and watched as she was banished from the pack. With hatred for her life, she runs deep into the woods that were off-limits and jumps off to end her life, but in a turn of events, something else happens. What would her mate do when he finds out that Veronica is not who he thinks she is? Will she be able to forgive him? What fate lies ahead for them?
In her previous life, Kimberly endured the betrayal of her husband, the cruel machinations of an evil woman, and the endless tyranny of her in-laws. It culminated in the bankruptcy of her family, and ultimately, her death. After being reborn, she resolved to seek retribution against those who had wronged her, and ensure her family's prosperity. To her shock, the most unattainable man from her past suddenly set his sights on her. "You may have overlooked me before, but I shall capture your heart this time around."
Sawyer, the world's top arms dealer, stunned everyone by falling for Maren—the worthless girl no one respected. People scoffed. Why chase a useless pretty face? But when powerful elites began gathering around her, jaws dropped. "She's not even married to him yet—already cashing in on his power?" they assumed. Curious eyes dug into Maren's past... only to find she was a scientific genius, a world-renowned medical expert, and heiress to a mafia empire. Later, Sawyer posted online. "My wife treats me like the enemy. Any advice?"
For three years, Shane and Yvonne were wed, sharing heated nights, while his devotion clung to his ex. Yvonne strove to be a dutiful wife, yet their marriage felt hollow, built on desire rather than real warmth. All changed when she became pregnant, only for Shane to thrust her onto the operating table, warning, “Either you or the baby survives!” Broken by his cruelty, she vanished in grief and later returned, radiantly accomplished, leaving everyone awestruck. Haunted by remorse, Shane begged for another chance, but Yvonne only smiled and replied, “I’m sorry, men no longer interest me.”
Rena got into an entanglement with a big shot when she was drunk one night. She needed Waylen's help while he was drawn to her youthful beauty. As such, what was supposed to be a one-night stand progressed into something serious. All was well until Rena discovered that Waylen's heart belonged to another woman. When his first love returned, he stopped coming home, leaving Rena all alone for many nights. She put up with it until she received a check and farewell note one day. Contrary to how Waylen expected her to react, Rena had a smile on her face as she bid him farewell. "It was fun while it lasted, Waylen. May our paths never cross. Have a nice life." But as fate would have it, their paths crossed again. This time, Rena had another man by her side. Waylen's eyes burned with jealousy. He spat, "How the hell did you move on? I thought you loved only me!" "Keyword, loved!" Rena flipped her hair back and retorted, "There are plenty of fish in the sea, Waylen. Besides, you were the one who asked for a breakup. Now, if you want to date me, you have to wait in line." The next day, Rena received a credit alert of billions and a diamond ring. Waylen appeared again, got down on one knee, and uttered, "May I cut in line, Rena? I still want you."
"Love is blind!" Lucinda abandoned her beautiful and comfortable life because of a man. She married him and slaved off for him for three long years. One day, the scales finally fell off her eyes. She realized that all her efforts were in vain. Her husband, Nathaniel still treated her like shit. All he cared about was his lover. "Enough is enough! I quit wasting my years with an ungrateful man!" Lucinda's heart was shattered into many pieces, but she summoned up the courage to ask for a divorce. The news caused a stir online! A filthy rich young woman recently got divorced? She was a good catch! Countless CEOs and handsome young men immediately swarmed to her like bees to honey! Nathaniel couldn't take it anymore. He held a press conference and begged with teary eyes, "I love you, Lucinda. I can't live without you. Please come back to me." Would Lucinda give him a second chance? Read to find out!