They Were Counted

Candlelight, a mazurka, the rustle of silk across a ballroom in Kolozsvár, and outside the vast Transylvanian forests these dancing families have owned for a thousand years. Miklós Bánffy, himself a count and once his country's foreign minister, wrote this first volume of his Transylvanian trilogy from inside the very world it mourns: the Hungarian aristocracy in the years before 1914, feuding over petty politics, ruining themselves at the card table, sure the sun will never set on them.