'That is the poison of cities!' said Wanda, as she heard him. 'Who can have been so foolish as to tell him of the papers?'
'Your heir, my dear, will never want for reporters of any flattery,' said his father. 'It is as well he should run the gauntlet of them early.'
Bela listened, and said to his brother a little later: 'I like Paris. Paris prints everything we do, and the people read the print, and then they want to see us.'
'What good is that?' said Gela. 'I like home. They all of them know us; they don't want to see us. That is much better.'
'No, it isn't,' said Bela. 'One drives all day long at home, and there is nothing but the trees; here the trees are all people, and the people talk of us, and the people want to be us.'
'But they love us at home,' said Gela.
'That does not matter,' said Bela with hauteur.
Wanda called the children to her.
'Bela,' she said gently, 'do you know that once, not so very long ago, there was a little boy here in Paris very much like you, with golden hair and velvet coat like yours, and he was called the Dauphin, and when he went out with his servants, as you do, the people envied him, and talked of him, and put in print what he did each day? The people wanted to be him, as you say, but they did not love him—poor little child!—because they envied him so. And in a very little while—a very, very little while—because it was envy and not love, they put the Dauphin in prison, and they cut off his golden hair, and gave him nothing but bread and water and filthy straw, and locked him up all alone till he died. That is the use of being envied in Paris—or anywhere else. Gela is right. It is better when people love us.'
The next day, as Bela drove in his sledge down the white avenues through the staring crowds, his little fair face was very grave under its curls; he thought of the Dauphin.