They Were Found Wanting

Count Miklós Bánffy (1873–1950) by Lawrence Mynott 

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

(Erdélyi Tőrténet)

The Transylvanian Trilogy

by

MIKLÓS BÁNFFY

BOOK TWO

They Were Found Wanting

Translated by 
PATRICK THURSFIELD and KATALIN BÁNFFY-JELEN 

Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication
FOREWORD

PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

PART TWO
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six

PART THREE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four

PART FOUR
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six

PART FIVE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

PART SIX
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Copyright

For my dear children, for whom I first started on this translation of their grandfather’s greatest work so that they should learn to know him better, he who would have loved them so much.

 

 

K. Bánffy-Jelen

FOREWORD

by

PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

I FIRST DRIFTED into the geographical background of this remarkable book in the spring and summer of 1934, when I was nineteen‚ half-way through an enormous trudge from Holland to Turkey. Like many travellers, I fell in love with Budapest and the Hungarians, and by the time I got to the old principality of Transylvania‚ mostly on a borrowed horse, I was even deeper in.

With one interregnum, Hungary and Transylvania, which is three times the size of Wales, had been ruled by the Magyars for a thousand years. After the Great War‚ in which Hungary was a loser, the peace treaty took Transylvania away from the Hungarian crown and allotted it to the Romanians, who formed most of the population. The whole question was one of hot controversy, which I have tried to sort out and explain in a book called Between the Woods and the Water* largely to get things clear in my own mind; and, thank heavens, there is no need to go over it again in a short foreword like this. The old Hungarian landowners felt stranded and ill-used by history; nobody likes having a new nationality forced on them, still less, losing estates by expropriation. This, of course, is what happened to the descendants of the old feudal landowners of Transylvania.

By a fluke, and through friends I had made in Budapest and on the Great Hungarian Plain, I found myself wandering from castle to castle in what had been left of these age-old fiefs.

Hardly a trace of this distress was detectable to a stranger. In my case, the chief thing to survive is the memory of unlimited kindness. Though enormously reduced, remnants of these old estates did still exist, and, at moments it almost seemed as though nothing had changed. 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.