Charm and douceur de vivre was still afloat among the faded décor and the still undiminished libraries, and, out of doors, everything conspired to delight. Islanded in the rustic Romanian multitude, different in race and religious practice – the Hungarians were Catholics or Calvinists, the Romanians Orthodox or Uniat – and, with the phantoms of their lost ascendency still about them, the prevailing atmosphere conjured up the tumbling demesnes of the Anglo-Irish in Waterford or Galway with all their sadness and their magic. Homesick for the past, seeing nothing but their own congeners on the neighbouring estates and the few peasants who worked there, they lived in a backward-looking, a genealogical, almost a Confucian dream, and many sentences ended in a sigh.

It was in the heart of Transylvania – in the old princely capital then called Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca) that I first came across the name of Bánffy. It was impossible not to. Their palace was the most splendid in the city, just as Bonczhida was the pride of the country and both of them triumphs of the baroque style. Ever since the arrival of the Magyars ten centuries ago, the family had been foremost among the magnates who conducted Hungarian and Transylvanian affairs, and their portraits, with their slung dolmans, brocade tunics, jewelled scimitars and fur kalpaks with plumes like escapes of steam – hung on many walls.

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 emerges 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

* John Murray, 1980.

INTRODUCTION

Miklós Bánffy and the Transylvanian Trilogy

by
PATRICK THURSFIELD

MY ACQUAINTANCE with the works of Miklós Bánffy started one day some years ago when I was motoring from my home in Tangier to Rabat. My fellow passenger was a Hungarian friend, Kathy Jelen, who had lived for many years in Tangier and who was going to Rabat to sign some papers that confirmed her ownership of the copyright to her father’s works. All I had known about Kathy’s father, Count Miklós Bánffy, was that he had been a wealthy Hungarian magnate and politician; but I had not known before that he had for many years been a Member of Parliament; nor that he had been Foreign Minister in 1921/2; nor anything about his writings or of his directorship of the State theatres in Budapest; nor of his practical support for writers and artists, and indeed all ethnic Hungarians, in the new Romanian Transylvania of the 1920s and ’30s; nor anything of his role as a great landowner with a castle near Kolozsvár (once also called Klausenburg and now given the Romanian name of Cluj-Napoca) whose fortune derived from thousands of acres of forest in the mountains of Transylvania. During our leisurely four hour’s car ride we talked of little else and when Kathy told me  of his great trilogy, Erdélyi Tőrténet – in English A Transylvanian Tale – which had been a bestseller in Hungary in the 1930s but which had never been translated or published elsewhere as the last volume had not appeared until 1940 when all Europe was in the throes of war, I longed to know more. First of all she told me about the first book of the trilogy, Megszámláltattál – They Were Counted, which had just been re-issued on its own in Budapest and had been an immediate sell-out; and it had been because of this that Miklós Bánffy’s daughter had thought it wise to confirm her ownership of the copyright and so henceforth be entitled to receive some benefit, however modest, from her father’s works which was all that remained of her lost inheritance.