The Companions of the Silence 2: Prince Coriolani

In 1823, a mysterious stranger walks into the midst of the Companions of the Silence, claiming to be the notorious bandit Bel Demonio, but in fact, he is Mario Monteleone’s eldest son, Fulvio, Prince Coriolani. He then takes over the Companions and embarks on a mission of vengeance, while defying the traps laid for him by the diabolical Chief of Police, Johann Spurzheim. The Companions of the Silence, translated here for the first time, was retroactively linked by Paul Féval to his saga of the Black Coats, functioning as the backstory of that vast criminal conspiracy. The peak of development that he attained in The Companions of the Silence was so splendidly theatrical, that future exercises in a similar vein had no option but to take a step back and find new directions of development. The Companions of the Silence forms an important bridge between the author’s earlier tales of heroic banditry and the pioneering exercises in crime fiction that began with John Devil and continued with the The Black Coats.