The Castle in Transylvania by Jules Verne

Author:Jules Verne [Verne, Jules]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-935554-77-6
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2010-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

IX

The family of the Counts of Telek, one of the most ancient and illustrious in Romania, already held a considerable rank before the country acquired its independence around the beginning of the sixteenth century. Associated with all the political events that shaped the history of these provinces, the name of this family is gloriously inscribed in that history.

At present, less favored than that famous beech tree at the Castle of the Carpathians on which three branches remained, the house of Telek was reduced to one alone, the branch of the Teleks of Craiova, of which this young gentleman who had just arrived in the village of Werst was the last offshoot.

During his childhood, Franz had never left the patrimonial castle, where the Count and Countess of Telek resided. The descendants of this family enjoyed great consideration, and they put their fortune to good use. Leading the life of ease and pleasure of the nobility of the countryside, they hardly left the Craiova residence more than once a year when their affairs summoned them to the hamlet of that name, even though it was only a few miles away.

This kind of existence necessarily influenced the education of their only son, and Franz must for a long time have felt the effects of the environment where his youth was spent. For a tutor he had only an old Italian priest, who could teach him nothing but what he himself knew, and he didn’t know much. Thus the child, having become a young man, had acquired a very scanty knowledge of the sciences, the arts, and contemporary literature. Hunting with passion, running through the forests and plains night and day, pursuing deer or wild boar, attacking, knife in hand, the wild beasts of the mountains—those were the usual pastimes of the young count, who, being very brave and very resolute, accomplished veritable feats of prowess in these rough exercises.

The Countess of Telek died when her son was scarcely fifteen years of age, and he hadn’t yet reached twenty-one when the Count perished in a hunting accident.

The grief suffered by young Franz was extreme. Just as he mourned his mother, he mourned his father. Both had been snatched from him in the span of just a few years. All his tenderness, all the affection his heart contained, had till then been concentrated in filial love, which can be enough for the expansions of childhood and adolescence. But when the objects of this love were missing, never having had any friends, and his preceptor too being dead, he found himself alone in the world.

The young count stayed for three more years at the castle of Craiova, which he no longer wanted to leave. He lived there without seeking to create any outside relationships. He went only once or twice to Bucharest, since certain business affairs forced him to. But these were only brief absences, for he was always eager to return to his home.

This existence, however, could not last forever, and Franz ended up feeling a need to widen a horizon that the Romanian mountains narrowly limited, and to soar beyond them.

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