Miklos Banffy: They Were Divided

For five years of the 1890s, before any of the disasters had smitten, a cousin of Count Miklós Bánffy had led the government of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The period immediately after, from 1905, is the book’s setting. The grand world he describes was Edwardian Mitteleuropa. The men, however myopic, threw away their spectacles and fixed in monocles. They were the fashionable swells of Spy and late du Maurier cartoons, and their wives and favourites must have sat for Boldini and Helleu. Life in the capital was a sequence of parties, balls and race-meetings, and, in the country, of grandes battues where the guns were all Purdeys. Gossip, cigar-smoke and Anglophilia floated in the air; there were cliques where Monet, d’Annunzio and Rilke were appraised; hundreds of acres of forest were nightly lost at chemin de fer ;at daybreak lovers stole away from tousled four-posters through secret doors, and duels were fought, as they still were when I was there. The part played by politics suggests Trollope or Disraeli. The plains beyond flicker with mirages and wild horses, ragged processions of storks migrate across the sky; and even if the woods are full of bears, wolves, caverns, waterfalls, buffalos and wild lilac, the country scenes in Transylvania, oddly enough, remind me of Hardy.

Bánffy is a born story-teller. There are plots, intrigues, a murder, political imbroglios and passionate love-affairs, and though this particular counterpoint of town and country may sound like the stock-in-trade of melodrama, with a fleeting dash of Anthony Hope, it is nothing of the kind. But it is, beyond question, dramatic. Patrick Thursfield and Kathy Bánffy-Jelen have dealt brilliantly with the enormous text; and the author’s life and thoughtful cast of mind emerge with growing clarity. The prejudices and the follies of his characters are arranged in proper perspective and only half-censoriously, for humour and a sense of the absurd come to the rescue. His patriotic feelings are totally free of chauvinism, just as his instinctive promptings of tribal responsibility have not a trace of vanity. They urge him towards what he thought was right, and always with effect. (He was Minister of Foreign Affairs at a critical period in the 1920s.) If a hint of melancholy touches the pages here and there, perhaps this was inevitable in a time full of omens, recounted by such a deeply civilized man.

Chatsworth, Boxing Day, 1998

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John Murray, 1980.

‘And the fingers went on writing in letters of fire upon the plaster of the Wall of the King’s palace. And the third word was UPHARSIN — thy kingdom shall be divided.

‘But none could read the writing so drunk were they with much drinking of wine, and they wasted the Lord’s vessels of gold and silver which their ancestors had laid up in the house of the Lord, and they argued with each other praising their false gods made of gold and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood and of clay until there was no strength left in them.

‘And the armies of the Medes and Persians stood ready before the walls of the city and in the same night everyone within it was slain.’

BALINT ABADY STEPPED QUIETLY into the family box at the theatre at Kolozsvar. Even though he knew it well, for the Abadys like all the other old families in the district rented the same box every year, he still had to grope his way in the darkness to hang up his coat. Still somewhat blinded by the light from the stage he sat down in the best seat facing the stage, for his mother had stayed at home at Denestornya. Balint himself had driven up from the country, just for one night, because he wanted to see the gala performance of Madam Butterfly that was being given that evening, and especially the Butterfly herself, the famous Yvonne de Tréville, who often came from the Opéra Comique to sing in Kolozsvar.

He was late and the great love duet that closes the first act was just beginning. The music throbbed with passion, with love and desire; the sweet tones of the violins carried Puccini’s soaring melodies and above it all was the pure smooth voice of the French diva.

Balint was on the point of surrendering to the music when he felt himself overcome by a strange feeling of agitation, as if he were in the presence of an overpowering force, a force even more potent than the storm of emotion that was being enacted before him on the stage. It was like an electric shock to his nervous system and something, he knew not what, made him turn round.

Adrienne Miloth was sitting in the next box, almost directly behind him.

He was startled to see her there because he had heard that she had gone to Switzerland with her daughter and he had not thought she would have returned so soon. This evening he saw that she and her sister Margit were guests in the kindly old Countess Gyalakuthy’s box. There she sat; and though she was so close she seemed as insubstantial as a phantom.

Her face was lit only by the moonlight from the stage which cast the faintest glow on her delicately aquiline nose, her cheeks and her generous mouth. Balint could just see the pale sheen of her skin where the neck and shoulders merged into the deep décolleté of her silver dress. Everything else was hidden in the darkness of the theatre.

She was looking straight ahead, quite motionless, as still as a marble statue. In the reflection of the cunningly contrived moonlight on the stage Adrienne’s eyes shone emerald green; and she sat there rigidly, without moving a muscle, though he could hardly believe that she had not seen him come in because he had sat down just in front of her. They were so close that with only the slightest movement their arms would have touched.

Balint felt that he could not stay there another moment. It would be impossible for him, for them both, to sit next to each other and behave as if they were strangers. How could they listen together to that passionate music which spoke so eloquently of desire and love and desperate yearning? No! No! No! He must not stay! He could not stay!

The memories of their love so overwhelmed him that he found himself trembling. He got up silently and slipped out of the box, reeling slightly like a man who has been struck a heavy blow.

Though he could not sit next to her he still could not leave the theatre in which she sat; so he descended the great stair, crossed to the other side of the auditorium and, with his coat on, stepped through one of the doors and stood at the side of the stalls in the shadow of the balcony. No one would be able to see him there, he thought, so he would remain until the act came to an end and then slip out before the lights went up. From there, too, he could gaze at Adrienne whom he had not seen for more than a year: and even then it had been a mere glance from afar.

She did not seem changed. Maybe her face was a little thinner, perhaps there was a trace of bitterness about the lines of her mouth, but she was still supremely beautiful, every aspect of her as lovely as when she had been his love, his friend, his companion in body and spirit, in those days when they had planned to become husband and wife. But an implacable fate had separated them.

In his imagination he saw her stripped of that shining metallic gown, bright as a suit of armour, standing naked before him as she first had five long years before in Venice, then so often afterwards in their little hut in the forest, or at the Uzdy villa, or at her father’s house at Mezo-Varjas, or in Budapest, indeed anywhere their homeless love could find refuge. Balint’s heart contracted with bitterness when he thought once again of how he had been forced to abandon her and how she had ordered him to marry Lili Illesvary whom she herself had picked out for him.