Haller hesitated.
"Come! Out with it. You could not, if you tried, invent anything half so entertaining. Stop playing up there, will you! This is something like a joke."
The company urged Haller to lose no time in passing the joke on.
"There is not much to tell," said Haller, shrugging his shoulders. "It is only that Ali Pasha has proclaimed Michael Apafi Prince of Transylvania."
"Ha! ha! ha!" resounded on all sides. The Prince, with comic affectation, turned first to one and then to the other.
"Who is the individual? Does any one know him? Has anybody ever heard of him?"
Lady Banfi turned pale and clung tightly to her husband's arm, who leaned his elbow on the table and replied with sublime indifference—
"The poor devil is, I believe, a very distant connection of mine. He has married some relation or other of my wife's. He was for a long time a slave among the Tartars, and the Turks (being wroth with us just now) have no doubt only released him on condition that he allows himself to be made Prince. He must be clean out of his senses."
At this all the gentlemen laughed still more loudly than before.
"Well, we'll go and inaugurate him," said Kemeny sarcastically, throwing back his head.