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 passed directly from the information in regard to the illness of Princess Z. to an allegorical tale in which Andras saw the secret of his life and the wounds of his heart laid bare.

            A little Parisian romance
   Like most of the Parisian romances of to-day, the little romance in
   question is an exotic one.  Paris belongs to foreigners.  When the
   Parisians, whose names appear in the chronicles of fashion, are not
   Americans, Russians, Roumanians, Portuguese, English, Chinese, or
   Hungarians, they do not count; they are no longer Parisians.  The
   Parisians of the day are Parisians of the Prater, of the Newski
   Perspective or of Fifth Avenue; they are no longer pureblooded
   Parisians.  Within ten years from now the boulevards will be
   situated in Chicago, and one will go to pass his evenings at the
   Eden Theatre of Pekin.  So, this is the latest Parisian romance: