PRINCE IN POVERTY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19762, 8 October 1927, Page 5 (Supplement)

PRINCE IN POVERTY.

WIFE AND CHILD CAPTIVE. HOSTAGES IN RUSSIA. When a chauffeur was fined 25 francs by the magistrate at the 13th Paris Tribunal lately for knocking down a pedestrian, he asked leave to speak, and unfolded a pathetic story of the Russian Revolution. He was summoned as M. Daske, but he told the court that his real name was Prince Vlov, and that at the beginning of the war he was a colonel of the Russian General Staff." When the Russian Revolution broke ouj, the defendant said, he was thrown into prison by the Bolsheviks, and uis uncle, arrested at the same time, was assassinated. He was about to share this fate when his captors learnt that e uncle's estates, to which he was heir, were in France. He was liberated from prison and told to go to France, realise the estate in hard cash, and return :> Russia. i order to ensure his return, however, the Bolsheviks hit on the brutal idea of filling his place at the Kremlin with his wife and 10-year-old child. The unfortunate princess *nd her boy are still lying in the prison, for Prince Vlov, when he reached Paris, learnt to his dismay that charges against the estate, combined with the depreciated rate of exchange, had reduced his inheritance to practically nothing He could not return empty-handed, and is now ekeing out a living by plying his taxicsb for hire on the Paris Boulevards.