A RUSSIAN NABOB. How the Duke of Mondelfi Spends His Money.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 336, 23 January 1889, Page 5

A RUSSIAN NABOB. How the Duke of Mondelfi Spends His Money.

Bbilliant novelists and dramatists would | undoubtedly find a subject worthy of study and description in the person of the Duke of Mondelfi, an opulent member of the important Russian colony in Paris. The Duke leads a life which resembles to a certain extent that of one of those Eoman Emperors or Oriental potentates described by picturesque historians. He lives in a splendid hotel in the Avenue dv Bois de Boulogne with his mother, Princess VYoionzoff, who was sister of Prince Nicolas Troubetzkoi, and a member of the household of the Czar before her lawsuit with her nephew, Count \Yoronzoff, one of the Emperor Alexander's Court Marshals. The Duke of Mondelfi is reputed to have £80,000 a year, most; of which he manages to spend in a magnificent manner. He never goes to bed until daylight does appeal , and he generally gets up ab 3 o'clock in the afternoon. After a meal, and extended at full length on a sumptuous divan, lie receives his friends and visitors, his mother, the Princess, being present at the levee. On these occasions the Duke wears either a superb dressing- * gown in ivory-coloured plush, lined with satin of the hue of the peach and garnished with silver braiding and ornamented with jewels, or an ample jacket of heliotrope velvet, with gold-bi*aiding and clasped together with ducal coronets studded with brilliants. While conversing with his visitors the host, it is said, toys with precious ptones and diamonds of rare value, but polished and uncut. In the intervals of conversation a band of" Neopolitan fingers warble the melodious airs of sunny Italy, and these are succeeded by Tzigane musicians, who make the ducal halls ring with their native wild and diabolical strains. After each musical performance the leader of the band approaches the divan, kisses the hand of tho most noble master of the hoiise, and receives his orders for the next morceau of domoniac music. • Later in the evening the Duke repairs to a splendid cafe on the Boulevards, where he dines with his friends and listens once more to the fiddlers, to whom he distributes bountiful largesse in the shape of fistfuls of louis, while his. guests quaff liberal bumpers of sparkling champagne m his honour. Such is an oatline of the ordinary life of an aristocrat; in this capital, which, despite its Spartan "Republicans and the lamentations of those who praise past days, is still evidently a. rendezvous of the gay and the luxurious. — - *' London Daily Telegraph."

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