“... 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....” The burning logs exploded sharply. De Medici sprang to his feet. “Damn!” he muttered. “It’s the door.” Walking swiftly across the shadowed room he shut the thing he fancied had frightened him. Yes, opened doors in a dark room, even a lighted room, always chilled him. They reminded him vaguely of something—of winding corridors, of hidden things waiting beyond them. He would sit, slowly terrified, watching an opened doorway, as if awaiting something, as if straining to catch a sound of clanking and wailing.... His earliest memories were those of fears. Windows, silences, doorways, darknesses, lights far away, candle-light in a mirror, winds howling, hidden noises—these were things of which he had been in terror as a boy. It had been that way with his father, the Prince Julien of the Paris ateliers—an indifferent artist, a violent-tempered, black-haired man who had died at forty, his name a byword even to the decadent aristocracy that postured futilely among the memories of France. Years after his death De Medici understood the tragedy of the man who had been his father. Rake and scoundrel, he had died raving in drink. A memory of debauches and black deeds had survived him. But as he grew older the De Medici son understood. These nightmares that bloomed in the recesses of his own thought, these terrors that animated the depths of his nature, had been his father’s legacy as well as his own. And, despairing of the ghosts whose whisperings darkened his life, the elder Prince Julien had fled. Drink, women, excesses—scenes of glaring lights and crazed laughter—these had been hiding-places. The notorious De Medici of the Paris ’90’s had been no more than a frightened refugee fleeing an inheritance.