The Passion and the Flower

Chapter One ~1867-1

Chapter One ~1867“His Highness Prince Ivan Volkonski!” a flunkey in the livery of the British Embassy announced in a loud voice.

Lord Marston, who was writing a letter, turned round from the desk at first incredulously and then sprang to his feet.

“Ivan, my dear fellow!” he exclaimed. “I had no idea you were in Paris.”

“I have only just arrived,” the Prince replied, “and I was delighted to be told that you were here.”

“I was sent over for my sins to report to the Prime Minister on the Exhibition,” Lord Marston said, “but now you have arrived I daresay that I can neglect my duties and we can enjoy ourselves.”

“We certainly will,” the Prince smiled.

He threw himself down in one of the comfortable chairs looking, his friend thought, even more handsome than he remembered.

Lord Marston and the Prince, who was a cousin of the Czar, had been close friends ever since they were young men when Lord Marston’s father was Ambassador to St. Petersburg.

They were of the same age and both had been involved in various escapades in Russia, France and England that had made Society in all three countries raise their eyebrows.

But it was in fact the Prince who was the ringleader in every outrageous adventure, for Lord Marston, conventionally English in many ways, would not on his own have embarked on such escapades.

His rather expressionless face was however smiling with pleasure and his eyes were alight as he sat opposite his friend and asked,

“Tell me, Ivan, what have you been up to now?”

The Prince’s eyes were twinkling.

His eyes were in fact the most arresting part about him. They were almost purple, fringed with long dark lashes and revealed in their depths all the wild passionate emotions that coursed through him.

It was perhaps chiefly his eyes that made the Prince so alluring to women that he left a trail of broken hearts behind him wherever he went.

He had almost classical features and the slim athletic body of a man who spends a great deal of his life in the saddle.

Even among the innumerable handsome men who decorated the Czar’s Court, Prince Ivan was outstanding.

“Who is it this time who has made it necessary for you to fly from what I am sure would be a just retribution?” Lord Marston asked.

“She was indeed very delectable,” the Prince laughed. “But enough is enough and, when the Czar was ordered by the Czarina to remonstrate with me, I thought that absence was the better part of valour.”

Lord Marston chuckled.

“I thought it would be a case of cherchez la femme! You will find plenty of your old flirts waiting for you here and a good many beauties to delight your eye.”

He paused before he went on,

“As you can imagine they have all flocked into Paris for the pickings of the Exhibition, but in consequence the place is unpleasantly overcrowded.”

“That is what I expected,” the Prince replied. “But I daresay as old habitués of the most exotic haunts we will not be turned away.”

“You may be quite sure of that,” Lord Marston agreed dryly.

The Prince was not only enormously rich but he was exceedingly generous.

Whoever else would not be able to obtain a box at the theatre, the best table in a restaurant and a welcome in every aristocratic mansion, it would not be Prince Ivan.

“How is Russia?” Lord Marston enquired.

“Uncomfortable!” the Prince answered briefly.

Lord Marston looked surprised.

“What has happened now? I thought everything would be roses in the garden after the Emancipation Manifesto had been signed giving the serfs their freedom.”

The Prince’s expression was suddenly serious.

“The Golden Age was regarded as a permanency, but the peasants do not understand the responsibility of ownership.”

“I was present, if you remember, on the Sunday when the proclamation was read in the Churches and Alexander was hailed as the ‘Czar-Liberator’,” Lord Marston said. “I can still hear the cheers.”

“I am not likely to forget them either,” the Prince replied. “The rapture of the people was indescribable.”

“Then what has gone wrong?”

“The liberated serfs believed that the Czar had made them a gift of the land. Now they are told that they have to pay their own regular taxes so that, although they are free men, their poverty has increased.”

“It cannot be true!” Lord Marston exclaimed.

“Unfortunately it is. Riots have broken out in many parts of the country and the peasants have even murdered landowners and officials.”

“I have heard there was some trouble” Lord Marston remarked, “but as you have so often said yourself, Ivan, Russia is a long way away.”

As he spoke, he remembered the Prince’s background and his houses where he had so often stayed.

It was to conjure up such a very different way of life from his own in England, so that sometimes he thought he had imagined the vast estates, the thousands of serfs bowing to the ground before their Master and the barbaric splendour of the Prince’s home, which was muffled in heavy snow for many months of the year.

It had seemed to him as a boy almost a Kingdom on its own.

There had been enormous buildings, like a City belonging to one man. Winter Gardens where life-sized marble statues stood among a jungle of tropical plants and, to emphasise the extravagance of it all, floors of tessellated marble, quartz or lapis lazuli from the Siberian mines.

Lord Marston had only to close his eyes to see rooms painted in green, dark blue or crimson, filled with fantastic treasures, and to hear the crackling of the tall porcelain stoves that glowed by day and night.

They were fed by logs brought in by relays of bare-footed serfs who also tended the lamps and lit the hundreds of wax candles that burnt all over the house in occupied and unoccupied rooms alike.

Samovars, ikons, vodka, caviar, violins, wild horses and even wilder riders were all part of the Prince’s background.

It was all, Lord Marston had always thought, divorced from reality and yet the magnificence of it did not detract from the personality of its owner.

Extravagance was not a word the Russian aristocrats understood.

An inamorata of a Grand Duke would travel in a sleigh festooned with emeralds and Parma violets would be rushed from Grasse in the South of France to prove that the Ducal affection was undiminished.

Life was as easily expendable, duelling was as frequent as a game of cards and crazy feats of daring were attempted for a wager or for sheer devilry.

Prince Ivan strode through the great rooms of his houses in the same way as he rode recklessly over the endless steppes, bringing to everything his own vivacious exotic charm.

The only cloud in a sunlit sky where the Prince was concerned was women.

He had, of course, an irresistible attraction for them but, while he was often infatuated and hunted them, as another man might hunt a wild animal with cunning and expertise and once they were captured he was bored.

It was the chase that delighted him not the kill and, no sooner had a woman surrendered herself abjectly and completely to his demands, he was looking over her shoulder for another amatory adventure.

“I may inform you,” Lord Marston said now, “that I am here officially and you are not to involve me in any scandal. Otherwise I shall be severely rapped over the knuckles, as I have been before.”

“We will behave with the utmost circumspection,” the Prince promised in his deep attractive voice, but his eyes were dancing and Lord Marston looking at him exclaimed,

“Oh, Ivan, Ivan! You always get me into trouble!”

“If I did not, you would become disgustingly stiff-necked and insular,” the Prince answered. “Well, I have told you about Russia. What is new in Paris?”

“Everything you can possibly imagine,” Lord Marston replied. “Do you wish to see the Exhibition?”

“Good God no! What is the reason for it?”

“Mostly political,” Lord Marston answered. “The French became very apprehensive after Prussia defeated Austria at the Battle of Sadowa last year!”

“What has that to do with an Exhibition?” the Prince asked.”

“The French Army is in no condition to undertake a campaign against Prussia, so the Emperor, Napoleon III, has decided that he must keep Parisian goodwill by providing them with magnificent jubilee shows and Court pageants.”

Prince Ivan laughed.

“Pagan weapons,” he said scornfully.

“Exactly,” his friend agreed.

“I intend to ignore both the Exhibition and the Court,” the Prince announced. “What else can you offer me?”

“The ‘demi-mondaines’.”

“A female of the half-world?”

The Prince raised his eyebrows.

“Is this another word for the courtesans, les expertes des Sciences, les femmes galantes, les grandes cocottes?”

“Exactly. It was invented some years ago by Dumas fils to describe the world of the déclassés. You must have heard of his play?”

“I suppose so, but I have forgotten about it,” the Prince answered.

“Then I will explain,” Lord Marston went on. “In the second act the hero explains the demi-monde to another man. He compares certain women to a basket of peaches where each fruit has a tiny flaw and says, ‘all the women around you have a fault in their past, a stain on their name. They have the same origins as Society women, they have the same appearance and prejudices, but they no longer belong to Society. They form what we call the ‘demi-mondaines’.”

“It is an excellent description,” the Prince said. “And let us, my dear Hugo, go and seek them out. I suppose La Païva is still walking about wearing a King’s ransom in jewels?”

“Of course,” Lord Marston replied.

La Païva, who usually displayed two million francs’ worth of diamonds, pearls and precious stones on her exquisite body, was considered the great debauchée of the century.

In an age of parvenues she remained the most immoral of them all.

She was supposed to have no heart, but Lord Marston knew that where the Prince was concerned she had a soft spot which none of the other gentlemen who squandered fortunes upon her had been able to discover.

“What about La Castiglione?” the Prince enquired.

“The Comtesse is still the mistress of the Emperor and another of your chères amies, Madame Mustard, has acquired an enormous fortune from the King of the Netherlands who is crazily infatuated with her.”

“A pretty piece,” the Prince remarked laconically.

“You can see her and all the rest in the Bois de Boulogne and their usual haunts,” Lord Marston said. “They continue to run through some wretched man’s entire fortune in a matter of weeks and then throw him away like a sucked orange.”

“I always come here expecting Paris to be different,” the Prince commented, “but it is invariably the same.”

“Paris is ‘toujours Paris’,” Lord Marston laughed, “and not even you, Ivan, can change that.”

“I don’t really think I want to,” the Prince replied, but he sounded doubtful.

His friend looked at him and then he asked.

“What are you looking for, Ivan? Ever since we have known each other I have always felt that you were searching for something.”

The Prince smiled.

“You are becoming like my beloved mother who, before she died last year, told me that if I fell in love with a ‘good woman’ it would be the saving of me.”

“Did the Princess really say that?”

“She said it not only once but a thousand times. She was obsessed by the idea that I should marry, settle down and have a large family. Of course, I am not wholly averse to the idea, it is only that – ”

He paused.

“ – You are afraid that you would find it a dead bore?” Lord Marston finished.

“With the women I have known so far, yes!” the Prince answered.

He rose to his feet to walk across the Savonnerie carpet restlessly.

‘The truth is, Hugo,” he said and his voice was serious, “I am well aware that I should take a wife and breed sons to inherit my huge possessions, but – ”

He paused and Lord Marston did not speak but waited.

“ – I have a feeling,” the Prince went on in a low voice, “that I am either an idealist or a romantic.”

“You are both,” his friend replied. “You always have been. Do you remember when we used to plan our lives together? I thought then, Ivan, that you always saw yourself as a benevolent despot bringing happiness to those who served you and living in some mythical idealistic world.”

“Dammit!” the Prince exclaimed. “You make me sound half-witted, but I suppose that there is some truth in what you say. I want something, Hugo, I want it with all my heart, but I don’t know what it is.”

Lord Marston looked at him with understanding.

He was closer to the Prince than anyone else had ever been and he knew how underneath his often-flamboyant behaviour he was, as he wished to be, a generous and kind despot.