ed 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, w