y?"
Why should he curse, he would think, other beings than Marsa and Menko?
He had no right to hate any one else; he had no enemy that he knew of,
and he was honored in Paris, his new country.
No enemy? No, not one. And yet, one morning, with his letters, his valet
brought him a journal addressed to "Prince Zilah," and, on unfolding it,
Andras's attention was attracted to two paragraphs in the column headed
"Echoes of Paris," which were marked with a red-lead pencil.
It was a number of 'L'Actualite', sent through the post by an unknown
hand, and the red marks were evidently intended to point out to the
Prince something of interest to himself.
Andras received few journals. A sudden desire seized him, as if he had
a presentiment of what it contained, to cast this one into the fire
without reading it. For a moment he held it in his fingers ready to
throw it into the grate. Then a few words read by accident invincibly
prevented him.
He read, at first with poignant sorrow, and then with a dull rage, the
two paragraphs, one of which followed the other in the paper.
"A sad piece of news has come to our ears," ran the first paragraph, "a
piece of news which has afflicted all the foreign colony of Paris, and
especially the Hungarians. The lovely and charming Princess Z., whose
beauty was recently crowned with a glorious coronet, has been taken,
after a consultation of the princes of science (there are princes in all
grades), to the establishment of Dr. Sims, at Vaugirard, the rival of
the celebrated asylum of Dr. Luys, at Ivry. Together with the numerous
friends of Prince A. Z., we hope that the sudden malady of the Princess
Z. will be of short duration."
So Marsa was now the patient, almost the prisoner, of Dr. Sims! The
orders of Dr. Fargeas had been executed. She was in an insane asylum,
and Andras, despite himself, felt filled with pity as he thought of it.
But the red mark surrounded both this first "Echo of Paris," and the one
which followed it; and Zilah, impelled now by eager curiosity, proceeded
with his reading.
But he uttered a cry of rage when he saw, printed at full length, given
over to common curiosity, to the eagerness of the public for
scandal, and to the malignity of blockheads, a direct allusion to his
marriage--worse than that, the very history of his marriage placed in
an outrageous manner next to the paragraph in which his name was almost
openly written. The editor of the society journal
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