A striking and bizarre figure, poised, precise and seemingly of another world, he lived chiefly in his eyes. They were narrow and black, symmetrical to a point of artificiality. But under the parenthesis of the brows lived a startling man.
From the carved chair before the burning logs, De Medici studied the shadows. He disliked darkness and empty rooms. Shadows frightened him. Opened doors chilled him. Yet his immobile face smiled derisively.
“Fear,” he thought. “It’s like a disease.”
He smiled again as if amused at the emotion disturbing him.
“Ghosts,” he continued to himself. His eyes were on the opened door in the shadows at the end of the room. “Ghosts walk around inside me.”
And he fell to thinking of an old subject—of the ghosts that prowled the mysterious corridors of his soul.... De Medici—ah, what a name! A sarcophagus of evil....
He recalled with a shudder the excitement of the critics who had written about the opening of his play at Victor Ballau’s theater two weeks ago. One of them in particular had given him a bad hour. A discerning fellow.... He remembered the critic’s phrases:
“... and now a De Medici turned dramatist. What a name to conjure with! One needs no genealogical chart to assure one that here in Julien De Medici writing plays for Broadway is a descendant of those monstrous and evil adventurers whose villainies once illumined the courts of Europe....”
De Medici smiled at the memory of the words.... A bit redundant and in the grand style affected by romantically hungry puritans writing for the press.... He continued recalling the review:
“For here again is the De Medici touch. Prince Julien, who witnessed the premier of his first drama—‘The Dead Flower’—is a gentleman of exemplary habits and enviable charm. But in this play to which he has signed his name lives again the sardonic evil which once made empire builders of his family. A dreadful humor pervades this amazing work. Its characters are etched with a Satanic deftness refreshingly new—for the stage.... Prince Julien of Broadway has borrowed the soul of his great-great-great-grandmother, with which to write his first drama....”