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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Prince Zilah, by Jules Claretie, v3
+#16 in our series The French Immortals Crowned by the French Academy
+#3 in our series by Jules Claretie
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+Title: Prince Zilah, v3
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+Author: Jules Claretie
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+Release Date: April, 2003  [Etext #3929]
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+
+
+
+
+
+PRINCE ZILAH
+
+By JULES CLARETIE
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+A LITTLE PARISIAN ROMANCE
+
+The very evening of the day when the package of letters had killed in
+Andras all happiness and all faith, the Hungarian prince presented
+himself in the Rue d'Aumale, to seek Michel Menko.
+
+Menko!  That boy whom he had loved almost as a brother, that man for whom
+he had hoped a glorious future, Michel, Michel Menko, had betrayed him,
+and struck him with the perfidy of a coward.  Yes, at the door of the
+church, when it was too late, or rather, at a time when the blow would be
+surer and the wound more deadly--then Menko had said to him: "My dear
+Prince, the woman whom you love, the woman whom you have married, has
+been my mistress.  Here, read, see how she loved me!"
+
+Had Michel been before him, Andras would have seized the young man by the
+throat, and strangled him on the spot; but, when he reached the Rue
+d'Aumale, he did not find Menko.
+
+"The Count left town yesterday," said the servant, in answer to his
+question.
+
+"Yesterday!  Where has he gone?"
+
+"The Count must have taken the steamer to-day at Havre for New York.
+The Count did not tell us exactly where he was going, however, but to
+America, somewhere.  We only know, the coachman Pierre, and myself, that
+the Count will not return again to Paris.  We are still in his service,
+however, and are to await his orders."
+
+Hesitating a little, the servant added:
+
+"Have I not the honor to speak to Prince Zilah?"
+
+"Why?"  asked Andras.
+
+The valet replied with a humble but very sincere air:
+
+"Because, if Monseigneur should hear from the Count, and there is any
+question of the package which I took to Maisons-Lafitte this morning for
+Monseigneur--"
+
+"Well?"  said Andras.
+
+"Monseigneur would greatly oblige me if he would not let the Count know
+that I did not fulfil his orders last evening."
+
+"Last evening?  What do you mean?  Explain yourself!" said the Prince,
+sternly.
+
+"When he left yesterday, the Count expressly ordered me to take the
+package to Monseigneur that very evening.  I beg Monseigneur's pardon;
+but I had an invitation to a wedding, and I did not carry out the Count's
+instructions until this morning.  But, as Monseigneur was not at home,
+I took the train to Maisons-Lafitte.  I hope that I did not arrive too
+late.  The Count was very particular about it, and I should be very sorry
+if my negligence has done any harm."
+
+Andras listened, gazing intently upon the face of the servant, who was a
+little discountenanced by this silent inquisition.
+
+"So Count Menko wished the package to be delivered to me yesterday?"
+
+"I beg Monseigneur not to tell the Count that he was not obeyed."
+
+"Yesterday?"  repeated Andras.
+
+"Yes, yesterday, Monseigneur.  The Count departed, thinking it would be
+done; and, indeed, he had a right to think so.  I am very careful,
+Monseigneur, very careful; and if Monseigneur should some day have need
+of a--"
+
+The Prince stopped the valet with a gesture.  It was repugnant to Andras
+to have this man mixed up in a secret of his life; and such a secret!
+But the domestic was evidently ignorant what a commission Menko had
+confided to him: in his eyes, the package, containing such letters, was
+like any other package.  Andras was persuaded of this by the attitude of
+the man, humiliated at having failed in his duty.
+
+A word more exchanged with the valet, and Andras would have felt
+humiliated himself.  But he had gained from the conversation the idea
+that Menko had not wished to insult him in his happiness, but to reveal
+all to him before the ceremony had yet been celebrated.  It was as
+atrocious, but not so cowardly.  Menko had wished to attack Marsa, rather
+than Andras; this was visible in the express commands given to his valet.
+And upon what a trifle had it depended, whether the name of Zilah should
+be borne by this woman!  Upon what?  Upon a servant's feast!  Life is
+full of strange chances.  The hands of that low-born valet had held for
+hours his happiness and his honor--his honor, Andras Zilah's--the honor
+of all his race!
+
+The Prince returned to his hotel, which he had left that morning thinking
+that he would soon bring there the woman he then adored, but whom he now
+despised and hated.  Oh! he would know where Menko had gone; him he could
+punish; as for Marsa, she was now dead to him.
+
+But where, in the whirlpool of the New World, would this Michel Menko
+disappear? and how could he find him?
+
+The days passed; and Zilah had acquired almost the certainty that Menko
+had not embarked at Havre.  Perhaps he had not quitted Europe.  He might,
+some day or another, in spite of what the valet had said, reappear in
+Paris; and then--
+
+Meanwhile, the Prince led the life of a man wounded to the heart; seeking
+solitude, and shutting himself in his hotel, in the Rue Balzac, like a
+wolf in his den; receiving no one but Varhely, and sometimes treating
+even old Yanski coldly; then, suddenly emerging from his retirement,
+and trying to take up his life again; appearing at the meetings of the
+Hungarian aid society, of which he was president; showing himself at the
+races, at the theatre, or even at Baroness Dinati's; longing to break the
+dull monotony of his now ruined life; and, with a sort of bravado,
+looking society and opinion full in the face, as if to surprise a smile
+or a sneer at his expense, and punish it.
+
+He had, however, no right to complain of the sentiment which was felt
+for him, for every one respected and admired him.  At first, it is true,
+society, and in particular that society of Parisian foreigners in which
+Prince Andras mingled, had tried to find out why he had broken so
+suddenly with the woman he had certainly married for love.  Public
+curiosity, aroused and excited, had sought to divine the secret of the
+romance.  "If it does not get into the newspapers," they said, "it will
+be fortunate."  And society was even astonished that the journals had not
+already discovered the key to this Parisian mystery.
+
+But society, after all as fickle as it is curious (one of its little
+vices chasing away the other), turned suddenly to another subject; forgot
+the rupture of Marsa and Andras, and saw in Zilah only a superior being,
+whose lofty soul forced respect from the frivolous set accustomed to
+laugh at everything.
+
+A lofty soul, yes, but a soul in torment.  Varhely alone, among them all,
+knew anything of the suffering which Andras endured.  He was no longer
+the same man.  His handsome face, with its kindly eyes and grave smile,
+was now constantly overshadowed.  He spoke less, and thought more.
+On the subject of his sadness and his grief, Andras never uttered a word
+to any one, not even to his old friend; and Yanski, silent from the day
+when he had been an unconscious messenger of ill, had not once made any
+allusion to the past.
+
+Although he knew nothing, Varhely had, nevertheless, guessed everything,
+and at once.  The blow was too direct and too cruelly simple for the old
+Hungarian not to have immediately exclaimed, with rage:
+
+"Those were love-letters, and I gave them to him!  Idiot that I was!  I
+held those letters in my hand; I might have destroyed them, or crammed
+them one by one down Menko's throat!  But who could have suspected such
+an infamy?  Menko!  A man of honor!  Ah, yes; what does honor amount to
+when there is a woman in question?  Imbecile!  And it is irreparable now,
+irreparable!"
+
+Varhely also was anxious to know where Menko had gone.  They did not know
+at the Austro-Hungarian embassy.  It was a complete disappearance,
+perhaps a suicide.  If the old Hungarian had met the young man, he would
+at least have gotten rid of part of his bile.  But the angry thought that
+he, Varhely, had been associated in a vile revenge which had touched
+Andras, was, for the old soldier, a constant cause for ill-humor with
+himself, and a thing which, in a measure, poisoned his life.
+
+Varhely had long been a misanthrope himself; but he tried to struggle
+against his own temperament when he saw Andras wrapping himself up in
+bitterness and gloomy thoughts.
+
+Little by little, Zilah allowed himself to sink into that state where not
+only everything becomes indifferent to us, but where we long for another
+suffering, further pain, that we may utter more bitter cries, more
+irritated complaints against fate.  It seems then that everything is dark
+about us, and our endless night is traversed by morbid visions, and
+peopled with phantoms.  The sick man--for the one who suffers such
+torture is sick--would willingly seek a new sorrow, like those wounded
+men who, seized with frenzy, open their wounds themselves, and irritate
+them with the point of a knife.  Then, misanthropy and disgust of life
+assume a phase in which pain is not without a certain charm.  There is a
+species of voluptuousness in this appetite for suffering, and the
+sufferer becomes, as it were, enamored of his own agony.
+
+With Zilah, this sad state was due to a sort of insurrection of his
+loyalty against the many infamies to be met with in this world, which he
+had believed to be only too full of virtues.
+
+He now considered himself an idiot, a fool, for having all his life
+adored chimeras, and followed, as children do passing music, the fanfares
+of poetic chivalry.  Yes, faith, enthusiasm, love, were so many cheats,
+so many lies.  All beings who, like himself, were worshippers of the
+ideal, all dreamers of better things, all lovers of love, were inevitably
+doomed to deception, treason, and the stupid ironies of fate.  And, full
+of anger against himself, his pessimism of to-day sneering at his
+confidence of yesterday, he abandoned himself with delight to his
+bitterness, and he took keen joy in repeating to himself that the secret
+of happiness in this life was to believe in nothing except treachery, and
+to defend oneself against men as against wolves.
+
+Very rarely, his real frank, true nature would come to the fore, and he
+would say:
+
+"After all, are the cowardice of one man, and the lie of one woman, to be
+considered the crime of entire humanity?"
+
+Why should he curse, he would think, other beings than Marsa and Menko?
+He had no right to hate any one else; he had no enemy that he knew of,
+and he was honored in Paris, his new country.
+
+No enemy?  No, not one.  And yet, one morning, with his letters, his
+valet brought him a journal addressed to "Prince Zilah," and, on
+unfolding it, Andras's attention was attracted to two paragraphs in the
+column headed "Echoes of Paris," which were marked with a red-lead
+pencil.
+
+It was a number of 'L'Actualite', sent through the post by an unknown
+hand, and the red marks were evidently intended to point out to the
+Prince something of interest to himself.
+
+Andras received few journals.  A sudden desire seized him, as if he had a
+presentiment of what it contained, to cast this one into the fire without
+reading it.  For a moment he held it in his fingers ready to throw it
+into the grate.  Then a few words read by accident invincibly prevented
+him.
+
+He read, at first with poignant sorrow, and then with a dull rage, the
+two paragraphs, one of which followed the other in the paper.
+
+"A sad piece of news has come to our ears," ran the first paragraph, "a
+piece of news which has afflicted all the foreign colony of Paris, and
+especially the Hungarians.  The lovely and charming Princess Z., whose
+beauty was recently crowned with a glorious coronet, has been taken,
+after a consultation of the princes of science (there are princes in all
+grades), to the establishment of Dr. Sims, at Vaugirard, the rival of the
+celebrated asylum of Dr. Luys, at Ivry.  Together with the numerous
+friends of Prince A. Z., we hope that the sudden malady of the Princess
+Z. will be of short duration."
+
+So Marsa was now the patient, almost the prisoner, of Dr. Sims!  The
+orders of Dr. Fargeas had been executed.  She was in an insane asylum,
+and Andras, despite himself, felt filled with pity as he thought of it.
+
+But the red mark surrounded both this first "Echo of Paris," and the one
+which followed it; and Zilah, impelled now by eager curiosity, proceeded
+with his reading.
+
+But he uttered a cry of rage when he saw, printed at full length, given
+over to common curiosity, to the eagerness of the public for scandal, and
+to the malignity of blockheads, a direct allusion to his marriage--worse
+than that, the very history of his marriage placed in an outrageous
+manner next to the paragraph in which his name was almost openly written.
+The editor of the society journal passed directly from the information in
+regard to the illness of Princess Z. to an allegorical tale in which
+Andras saw the secret of his life and the wounds of his heart laid bare.
+
+                        A LITTLE PARISIAN ROMANCE
+     Like most of the Parisian romances of to-day, the little romance in
+     question is an exotic one.  Paris belongs to foreigners.  When the
+     Parisians, whose names appear in the chronicles of fashion, are not
+     Americans, Russians, Roumanians, Portuguese, English, Chinese, or
+     Hungarians, they do not count; they are no longer Parisians.  The
+     Parisians of the day are Parisians of the Prater, of the Newski
+     Perspective or of Fifth Avenue; they are no longer pureblooded
+     Parisians.  Within ten years from now the boulevards will be
+     situated in Chicago, and one will go to pass his evenings at the
+     Eden Theatre of Pekin.  So, this is the latest Parisian romance:
+     Once upon a time there was in Paris a great lord, a Moldavian, or a
+     Wallachian, or a Moldo-Wallachian (in a word, a Parisian--a Parisian
+     of the Danube, if you like), who fell in love with a young Greek,
+     or Turk, or Armenian (also of Paris), as dark-browed as the night,
+     as beautiful as the day.  The great lord was of a certain age, that
+     is, an uncertain age.  The beautiful Athenian or Georgian, or
+     Circassian, was young.  The great lord was generally considered to
+     be imprudent.  But what is to be done when one loves?  Marry or
+     don't marry, says Rabelais or Moliere.  Perhaps they both said it.
+     Well, at all events, the great lord married.  It appears, if well-
+     informed people are to be believed, that the great Wallachian lord
+     and the beautiful Georgian did not pass two hours after their
+     marriage beneath the same roof.  The very day of their wedding,
+     quietly, and without scandal, they separated, and the reason of this
+     rupture has for a long time puzzled Parisian high-life.  It was
+     remarked, however, that the separation of the newly-married pair was
+     coincident with the disappearance of a very fashionable attache who,
+     some years ago, was often seen riding in the Bois, and who was then
+     considered to be the most graceful waltzer of the Viennese, or
+     Muscovite, or Castilian colony of Paris.  We might, if we were
+     indiscreet, construct a whole drama with these three people for our
+     dramatis personae,; but we wish to prove that reporters (different
+     in this from women) sometimes know how to keep a secret.  For those
+     ladies who are, perhaps, still interested in the silky moustaches of
+     the fugitive ex-diplomat, we can add, however, that he was seen at
+     Brussels a short time ago.  He passed through there like a shooting
+     star.  Some one who saw him noticed that he was rather pale, and
+     that he seemed to be still suffering from the wounds received not
+     long ago.  As for the beautiful Georgian, they say she is in despair
+     at the departure of her husband, the great Wallachian lord, who, in
+     spite of his ill-luck, is really a Prince Charming.
+
+Andras Zilah turned rapidly to the signature of this article.  The
+"Echoes of Paris" were signed Puck.  Puck?  Who was this Puck?  How could
+an unknown, an anonymous writer, a retailer of scandals, be possessed of
+his secret?  For Andras believed that his suffering was a secret; he had
+never had an idea that any one could expose it to the curiosity of the
+crowd, as this editor of L'Actualite had done.  He felt an increased rage
+against the invisible Michel Menko, who had disappeared after his infamy;
+and it seemed to him that this Puck, this unknown journalist, was an
+accomplice or a friend of Michel Menko, and that, behind the pseudonym of
+the writer, he perceived the handsome face, twisted moustache and haughty
+smile of the young Count.
+
+"After all," he said to himself, "we shall soon find out.  Monsieur Puck
+must be less difficult to unearth than Michel Menko."
+
+He rang for his valet, and was about to go out, when Yanski Varhely was
+announced.
+
+The old Hungarian looked troubled, and his brows were contracted in a
+frown.  He could not repress a movement of anger when he perceived, upon
+the Prince's table, the marked number of L'Actualite.
+
+Varhely, when he had an afternoon to get rid of, usually went to the
+Palais-Royal.  He had lived for twenty years not far from there, in a
+little apartment near Saint-Roch.  Drinking in the fresh air, under the
+striped awning of the Cafe de la Rotunde, he read the journals, one after
+the other, or watched the sparrows fly about and peck up the grains in
+the sand.  Children ran here and there, playing at ball; and, above the
+noise of the promenaders, arose the music of the brass band.
+
+It was chiefly the political news he sought for in the French or foreign
+journals.  He ran through them all with his nose in the sheets, which he
+held straight out by the wooden file, like a flag.  With a rapid glance,
+he fell straight upon the Hungarian names which interested him--Deak
+sometimes, sometimes Andrassy; and from a German paper he passed to an
+English, Spanish, or Italian one, making, as he said, a tour of Europe,
+acquainted as he was with almost all European languages.
+
+An hour before he appeared at the Prince's house, he was seated in the
+shade of the trees, scanning 'L'Actualite', when he suddenly uttered an
+oath of anger (an Hungarian 'teremtete!') as he came across the two
+paragraphs alluding to Prince Andras.
+
+Varhely read the lines over twice, to convince himself that he was not
+mistaken, and that it was Prince Zilah who was designated with the
+skilfully veiled innuendo of an expert journalist.  There was no chance
+for doubt; the indistinct nationality of the great lord spoken of thinly
+veiled the Magyar characteristics of Andras, and the paragraph which
+preceded the "Little Parisian Romance" was very skilfully arranged to let
+the public guess the name of the hero of the adventure, while giving to
+the anecdote related the piquancy of the anonymous, that velvet mask of
+scandal-mongers.
+
+Then Varhely had only one idea.
+
+"Andras must not know of this article.  He scarcely ever reads the
+journals; but some one may have sent this paper to him."
+
+And the old misanthrope hurried to the Prince's hotel, thinking this:
+that there always exist people ready to forward paragraphs of this kind.
+
+When he perceived 'L'Actualite' upon the Prince's table, he saw that his
+surmise was only too correct, and he was furious with himself for
+arriving too late.
+
+"Where are you going?"  he asked Andras, who was putting on his gloves.
+
+The Prince took up the marked paper, folded it slowly, and replied:
+
+"I am going out."
+
+"Have you read that paper?"
+
+"The marked part of it, yes."
+
+"You know that that sheet is never read, it has no circulation whatever,
+it lives from its advertisements.  There is no use in taking any notice
+of it."
+
+"If there were question only of myself, I should not take any notice of
+it.  But they have mixed up in this scandal the name of the woman to whom
+I have given my name.  I wish to know who did it, and why he did it."
+
+"Oh! for nothing, for fun!  Because this Monsieur--how does he sign
+himself?--Puck had nothing else to write about."
+
+"It is certainly absurd," remarked Zilah, "to imagine that a man can live
+in the ideal.  At every step the reality splashes you with mud."
+
+As he spoke, he moved toward the door.
+
+"Where are you going?"  asked Varhely again.
+
+"To the office of this journal."
+
+"Do not commit such an imprudence.  The article, which has made no stir
+as yet, will be read and talked of by all Paris if you take any notice of
+it, and it will be immediately commented upon by the correspondents of
+the Austrian and Hungarian journals."
+
+"That matters little to me!"  said the Prince, resolutely.  "Those people
+will only do what their trade obliges them to.  But, before everything,
+I am resolved to do my duty.  That is my part in this matter."
+
+"Then I will accompany you."
+
+"No," replied Andras, "I ask you not to do that; but it is probable that
+to-morrow I shall request you to serve as my second."
+
+"A duel?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"With Monsieur--Puck?"
+
+"With whoever insults me.  The name is perfectly immaterial.  But since
+he escapes me and she is irresponsible--and punished--I regard as an
+accomplice of their infamy any man who makes allusion to it with either
+tongue or pen.  And, my dear Varhely, I wish to act alone.  Don't be
+angry; I know that in your hands my honor would be as faithfully guarded
+as in my own."
+
+"Without any doubt," said Varhely, in an odd tone, pulling his rough
+moustache, "and I hope to prove it to you some day."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE HOME OF "PUCK"
+
+Prince Zilah did not observe at all the marked significance old Yanski
+gave to this last speech.  He shook Varhely's hand, entered a cab, and,
+casting a glance at the journal in his hands, he ordered the coachman to
+drive to the office of 'L'Actualite', Rue Halevy, near the Opera.
+
+The society journal, whose aim was represented by its title, had its
+quarters on the third floor in that semi-English section where bars,
+excursion agencies, steamboat offices, and manufacturers of travelling-
+bags give to the streets a sort of Britannic aspect.  The office of
+'L'Actualite' had only recently been established there.  Prince Zilch
+read the number of the room upon a brass sign and went up.
+
+In the outer office there were only two or three clerks at work behind
+the grating.  None of these had the right to reveal the names hidden
+under pseudonyms; they did not even know them.  Zilch perceived, through
+an open door, the reporters' room, furnished with a long table covered
+with pens, ink, and pads of white paper.  This room was empty; the
+journal was made up in the evening, and the reporters were absent.
+
+"Is there any one who can answer me?"  asked the Prince.
+
+"Probably the secretary can," replied a clerk.  "Have you a card,
+Monsieur?  or, if you will write your name upon a bit of paper, it will
+do."
+
+Andras did so; the clerk opened a door in the corridor and disappeared.
+After a minute or two he reappeared, and said to the Prince:
+
+"If you will follow me, Monsieur Freminwill see you."
+
+Andras found himself in the presence of a pleasant-looking middle-aged
+man, who was writing at a modest desk when the Hungarian entered, and who
+bowed politely, motioning him to be seated.
+
+As Zilch sat down upon the sofa, there appeared upon the threshold of a
+door, opposite the one by which he had entered, a small, dark, elegantly
+dressed young man, whom Andras vaguely remembered to have seen somewhere,
+he could not tell where.  The newcomer was irreproachable in his
+appearance, with his clothes built in the latest fashion, snowy linen,
+pale gray gloves, silver-headed cane, and a single eyeglass, dangling
+from a silken cord.
+
+He bowed to Zilch, and, going up to the secretary, he said, rapidly:
+
+"Well!  since Tourillon is away, I will report the Enghien races.  I am
+going there now.  Enghien isn't highly diverting, though.  The swells and
+the pretty women so rarely go there; they don't affect Enghien any more.
+But duty before everything, eh, Fremin?"
+
+"You will have to hurry," said Fremin, looking at his watch, "or you will
+miss your train."
+
+"Oh! I have a carriage below."
+
+He clapped his confrere on the shoulder, bowed again to Zilah, and
+hurried away, while Fremin, turning to the Prince, said:
+
+"I am at your service, Monsieur," and waited for him to open the
+conversation.
+
+Zilah drew from his pocket the copy of L'Actualite, and said, very
+quietly:
+
+"I should like to know, Monsieur, who is meant in this article here."
+
+And, folding the paper, with the passage which concerned him uppermost,
+he handed it to the secretary.
+
+Fremin glanced at the article.
+
+"Yes, I have seen this paragraph," he said; "but I am entirely ignorant
+to whom it alludes.  I am not even certain that it is not a fabrication,
+invented out of whole cloth."
+
+"Ah!"  said Zilah.  "The author of the article would know, I suppose?"
+
+"It is highly probable," replied Fremin, with a smile.
+
+"Will you tell me, then, the name of the person who wrote this?"
+
+"Isn't the article signed?"
+
+"It is signed Puck.  That is not a name."
+
+"A pseudonym is a name in literature," said Fremin.  "I am of the
+opinion, however, that one has always the right to demand to see a face
+which is covered by a mask.  But the person who makes this demand should
+be personally interested.  Does this story, to which you have called my
+attention, concern you, Monsieur?"
+
+"Suppose, Monsieur," answered Zilah, a little disconcerted, for he
+perceived that he had to do with a courteous, well-bred man, "suppose
+that the man who is mentioned, or rather insulted, here, were my best
+friend.  I wish to demand an explanation of the person who wrote this
+article, and to know, also, if it was really a journalist who composed
+those lines."
+
+"You mean?--"
+
+"I mean that there may be people interested in having such an article
+published, and I wish to know who they are."
+
+"You are perfectly justified, Monsieur; but only one person can tell you
+that--the writer of the article."
+
+"It is for that reason, Monsieur, that I desire to know his name."
+
+"He does not conceal it," said Fremin.  "The pseudonym is only designed
+as a stimulant to curiosity; but Puck is a corporeal being."
+
+"I am glad to hear it," said Zilah.  "Now, will you be kind enough to
+give me his name?"
+
+"Paul Jacquemin."
+
+Zilah knew the name well, having seen it at the end of a report of his
+river fete; but he hardly thought Jacquemin could be so well informed.
+Since he had lived in France, the Hungarian exile had not been accustomed
+to regard Paris as a sort of gossiping village, where everything is found
+out, talked over, and commented upon with eager curiosity, and where
+every one's aim is to appear to have the best and most correct
+information.
+
+"I must ask you now, Monsieur, where Monsieur Paul Jacquemin lives?"
+
+"Rue Rochechouart, at the corner of the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne."
+
+"Thank you, Monsieur," said Andras, rising, the object of his call having
+been accomplished.
+
+"One moment," said Fremin, "if you intend to go at once to Monsieur
+Jacquemin's house, you will not find him at home just now."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because you saw him here a few minutes ago, and he is now on his way to
+Enghien."
+
+"Indeed!"  said the Prince.  "Very well, I will wait."
+
+He bade farewell to Fremin, who accompanied him to the door; and, when
+seated in his carriage, he read again the paragraph of Puck--that Puck,
+who, in the course of the same article, referred many times to the
+brilliancy of "our colleague Jacquemin," and complacently cited the
+witticisms of "our clever friend Jacquemin."
+
+Zilah remembered this Jacquemin now.  It was he whom he had seen taking
+notes upon the parapet of the quay, and afterward at the wedding, where
+he had been brought by the Baroness Dinati.  It was Jacquemin who was
+such a favorite with the little Baroness; who was one of the licensed
+distributors of celebrity and quasi-celebrity for all those who live upon
+gossip and for gossip-great ladies who love to see their names in print,
+and actresses wild over a new role; who was one of the chroniclers of
+fashion, received everywhere, flattered, caressed, petted; whom the
+Prince had just seen, very elegant with his stick and eyeglass, and his
+careless, disdainful air; and who had said, like a man accustomed to
+every magnificence, fatigued with luxury, blase with pleasure, and caring
+only for what is truly pschutt (to use the latest slang): "Pretty women
+so rarely go there!"
+
+Zilah thought that, as the Baroness had a particular predilection for
+Jacquemin, it was perhaps she, who, in her gay chatter, had related the
+story to the reporter, and who, without knowing it probably, assuredly
+without wishing it, had furnished an article for 'L'Actualite'.  In all
+honor, Jacquemin was really the spoiled child of the Baroness, the
+director of the entertainments at her house.  With a little more conceit,
+Jacquemin, who was by no means lacking in that quality, however, might
+have believed that the pretty little woman was in love with him.  The
+truth is, the Baroness Dinati was only in love with the reporter's
+articles, those society articles in which he never forgot her, but paid,
+with a string of printed compliments, for his champagne and truffles.
+
+"And yet," thought Zilah, "no, upon reflection, I am certain that the
+Baroness had nothing to do with this outrage.  Neither with intention nor
+through imprudence would she have given any of these details to this
+man."
+
+Now that the Prince knew his real name, he might have sent to Monsieur
+Puck, Varhely, and another of his friends.  Jacquemin would then give an
+explanation; for of reparation Zilah thought little.  And yet, full of
+anger, and not having Menko before him, he longed to punish some one;
+he wished, that, having been made to suffer so himself, some one should
+expiate his pain.  He would chastise this butterfly reporter, who had
+dared to interfere with his affairs, and wreak his vengeance upon him as
+if he were the coward who had fled.  And, besides, who knew, after all,
+if this Jacquemin were not the confidant of Menko?  Varhely would not
+have recognized in the Prince the generous Zilah of former times, full of
+pity, and ready to forgive an injury.
+
+Andras could not meet Jacquemin that day, unless he waited for him at the
+office of 'L'Actualite' until the races were over, and he therefore
+postponed his intended interview until the next day.
+
+About eleven o'clock in the morning, after a sleepless night, he sought-
+the Rue Rochechouart, and the house Fremin had described to him.  It was
+there: an old weather-beaten house, with a narrow entrance and a
+corridor, in the middle of which flowed a dirty, foul-smelling stream of
+water; the room of the concierge looked like a black hole at the foot of
+the staircase, the balusters and walls of which were wet with moisture
+and streaked with dirt; a house of poor working-people, many stories
+high, and built in the time when this quarter of Paris was almost a
+suburb.
+
+Andras hesitated at first to enter, thinking that he must be mistaken.
+He thought of little Jacquemin, dainty and neat as if he had just stepped
+out of a bandbox, and his disdainful remarks upon the races of Enghien,
+where the swells no longer went.  It was not possible that he lived here
+in this wretched, shabby place.
+
+The concierge replied to the Prince, however, when he asked for
+Jacquemin: "Yes, Monsieur, on the fifth floor, the door to the right;"
+and Zilah mounted the dark stairs.
+
+When he reached the fifth floor, he did not yet believe it possible that
+the Jacquemin who lived there was the one he had seen the day before, the
+one whom Baroness Dinati petted, "our witty colleague Jacquemin."
+
+He knocked, however, at the door on the right, as he had been directed.
+No one came to open it; but he could hear within footsteps and indistinct
+cries.  He then perceived that there was a bell-rope, and he pulled it.
+Immediately he heard some one approaching from within.
+
+He felt a singular sensation of concentrated anger, united to a fear that
+the Jacquemin he was in search of was not there.
+
+The door opened, and a woman appeared, young, rather pale, with pretty
+blond hair, somewhat disheveled, and dressed in a black skirt, with a
+white dressing-sack thrown over her shoulders.
+
+She smiled mechanically as she opened the door, and, as she saw a strange
+face, she blushed crimson, and pulled her sack together beneath her chin,
+fastening it with a pin.
+
+"Monsieur Jacquemin?"  said Andras, taking off his hat.
+
+"Yes, Monsieur, he lives here," replied the young woman, a little
+astonished.
+
+"Monsieur Jacquemin, the journalist?"  asked Andras.
+
+"Yes, yes, Monsieur," she answered with a proud little smile, which Zilah
+was not slow to notice.  She now opened the door wide, and said, stepping
+aside to let the visitor pass:
+
+"Will you take the trouble to come in, Monsieur?"  She was not accustomed
+to receive calls (Jacquemin always making his appointments at the
+office); but, as the stranger might be some one who brought her husband
+work, as she called it, she was anxious not to let him go away before she
+knew what his errand was.
+
+"Please come in, Monsieur!"
+
+The Prince entered, and, crossing the entry in two steps, found himself
+in a small dining-room opening directly out of the kitchen, where three
+tiny little children were playing, the youngest, who could not have been
+more than eighteen months, crawling about on the floor.  Upon the ragged
+oilcloth which covered the table, Zilah noticed two pairs of men's
+gloves, one gray, the other yellow, and a heap of soiled white cravats.
+Upon a wooden chair, by the open door of the kitchen, was a tub full of
+shirts, which the young woman had doubtless been washing when the bell
+rang.
+
+The cries Zilah had heard came from the children, who were now silent,
+staring at the tall gentleman, who looked at them in surprise.
+
+The young woman was small and very pretty, but with the pallor of fatigue
+and overwork; her lips were beautifully chiselled, but almost colorless;
+and she was so thin that her figure had the frail appearance of an
+unformed girl.
+
+"Will you sit down, Monsieur?"  she asked, timidly, advancing a cane-
+bottomed chair.
+
+Everything in these poor lodgings was of the most shabby description.
+In a cracked mirror with a broken frame were stuck cards of invitation,
+theatre checks, and race tickets admitting to the grand stand.  Upon a
+cheap little table with broken corners was a heap of New Year's cards,
+bonbon boxes, and novels with soiled edges.  Upon the floor, near the
+children, were some remnants of toys; and the cradle in which the baby
+slept at night was pushed into a corner with a child's chair, the arms of
+which were gone.
+
+Zilah was both astonished and pained.  He had not expected to encounter
+this wretched place, the poorly clad children, and the woman's timid
+smile.
+
+"Is Monsieur Jacquemin at home?"  he asked abruptly, desiring to leave at
+once if the man whom he sought was not there.
+
+"No, Monsieur; but he will not be long away.  Sit down, Monsieur,
+please!"
+
+She entreated so gently, with such an uneasy air at the threatened
+departure of this man who had doubtless brought some good news for her
+husband, that the Prince mechanically obeyed, thinking again that there
+was evidently some mistake, and that it was not, it could not be, here
+that Jacquemin lived.
+
+"Is it really your husband, Madame, who writes under the signature of
+Puck in 'L'Actualite'?"  he asked.  The same proud smile appeared again
+upon her thin, wan face.
+
+"Yes, Monsieur, yes, it is really he!"  she replied. She was so happy
+whenever any one spoke to her of her Paul.  She was in the habit of
+taking copies of L'Actualite to the concierge, the grocer, and the
+butcher; and she was so proud to show how well Paul wrote, and what fine
+connections he had--her Paul, whom she loved so much, and for whom she
+sat up late at night when it was necessary to prepare his linen for some
+great dinner or supper he was invited to.
+
+"Oh!  it is indeed he, Monsieur," she said again, while Zilah watched her
+and listened in silence.  "I don't like to have him use pseudonyms, as he
+calls them.  It gives me so much pleasure to see his real name, which is
+mine too, printed in full.  Only it seems that it is better sometimes.
+Puck makes people curious, and they say, Who can it be?  He also signed
+himself Gavroche in the Rabelais, you know, which did not last very long.
+You are perhaps a journalist also, Monsieur?"
+
+"No," said Zilah.
+
+"Ah! I thought you were!  But, after all, perhaps you are right.  It is a
+hard profession, I sometimes think.  You have to be out so late.  If you
+only knew, Monsieur, how poor Paul is forced to work even at night!
+It tires him so, and then it costs so much.  I beg your pardon for
+leaving those gloves like that before you.  I was cleaning them.  He does
+not like cleaned gloves, though; he says it always shows.  Well, I am a
+woman, and I don't notice it.  And then I take so much care of all that.
+It is necessary, and everything costs so dear.  You see I--Gustave, don't
+slap your little sister!  you naughty boy!"
+
+And going to the children, her sweet, frank eyes becoming sad at a
+quarrel between her little ones, she gently took the baby away from the
+oldest child, who cried, and went into a corner to pout, regarding his
+mother with the same impudent air which Zilah had perceived in the curl
+of Jacquemin's lips when the reporter complained of the dearth of pretty
+women.
+
+"It is certainly very astonishing that he does not come home," continued
+the young wife, excusing to Zilah the absence of her Paul.  "He often
+breakfasts, however, in the city, at Brebant's.  It seems that it is
+necessary for him to do so.  You see, at the restaurant he talks and
+hears news.  He couldn't learn all that he knows here very well, could
+he?  I don't know much of things that must be put in a newspaper."
+
+And she smiled a little sad smile, making even of her humility a pedestal
+for the husband so deeply loved and admired.
+
+Zilah was beginning to feel ill at ease.  He had come with anger,
+expecting to encounter the little fop whom he had seen, and he found this
+humble and devoted woman, who spoke of her Paul as if she were speaking
+of her religion, and who, knowing nothing of the life of her husband,
+only loving him, sacrificed herself to him in this almost cruel poverty
+(a strange contrast to the life of luxury Jacquemin led elsewhere), with
+the holy trust of her unselfish love.
+
+"Do you never accompany your husband anywhere?"  asked Andras.
+
+"I?  Oh, never!"  she replied, with a sort of fright.  "He does not wish
+it--and he is right.  You see, Monsieur, when he married me, five years
+ago, he was not what he is now; he was a railway clerk.  I was a working-
+girl; yes, I was a seamstress.  Then it was all right; we used to walk
+together, and we went to the theatre; he did not know any one.  It is
+different now.  You see, if the Baroness Dinati should see me on his arm,
+she would not bow to him, perhaps."
+
+"You are mistaken, Madame," said the Hungarian, gently.  "You are the one
+who should be bowed to first."
+
+She did not understand, but she felt that a compliment was intended, and
+she blushed very red, not daring to say any more, and wondering if she
+had not chatted too much, as Jacquemin reproached her with doing almost
+every day.
+
+"Does Monsieur Jacquemin go often to the theatre?"  asked Andras, after a
+moment's pause.
+
+"Yes; he is obliged to do so."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Sometimes.  Not to the first nights, of course.  One has to dress
+handsomely for them.  But Paul gives me tickets, oh, as many as I want!
+When the plays are no longer drawing money, I go with the neighbors.
+But I prefer to stay at home and see to my babies; when I am sitting in
+the theatre, and they are left in charge of the concierge, I think,
+Suppose anything should happen to them!  And that idea takes away all my
+pleasure.  Still, if Paul stayed here--but he can not; he has his writing
+to do in the evenings.  Poor fellow, he works so hard!  Well!"  with a
+sigh, "I don't think that he will be back to-day.  The children will eat
+his beefsteak, that's all; it won't do them any harm."
+
+As she spoke, she took some pieces of meat from an almost empty cupboard,
+and placed them on the table, excusing herself for doing so before Zilah.
+
+And he contemplated, with an emotion which every word of the little woman
+increased, this poor, miserable apartment, where the wife lived, taking
+care of her children, while the husband, Monsieur Puck or Monsieur
+Gavroche, paraded at the fancy fairs or at the theatres; figured at the
+races; tasted the Baroness Dinati's wines, caring only for Johannisberg
+with the blue and gold seal of 1862; and gave to Potel and Chabot, in his
+articles, lessons in gastronomy.
+
+Then Madame Jacquemin, feeling instinctively that she had the sympathy of
+this sad-faced man who spoke to her in such a gentle voice, related her
+life to him with the easy confidence which poor people, who never see the
+great world, possess.  She told him, with a tender smile, the entirely
+Parisian idyl of the love of the working-girl for the little clerk who
+loved her so much and who married her; and of the excursions they used to
+take together to Saint-Germain, going third-class, and eating their
+dinner upon the green grass under the trees, and then enjoying the funny
+doings of the painted clowns, the illuminations, the music, and the
+dancing.  Oh! they danced and danced and danced, until she was so tired
+that she slept all the way home with her head on his shoulder, dreaming
+of the happy day they had had.
+
+"That was the best time of my life, Monsieur.  We were no richer than we
+are now; but we were more free.  He was with me more, too: now, he
+certainly makes me very proud with his beautiful articles; but I don't
+see him; I don't see him any more, and it makes me very sad.  Oh! if it
+were not for that, although we are not millionaires, I should be very
+happy; yes, entirely, entirely happy."
+
+There was, in the simple, gentle resignation of this poor girl,
+sacrificed without knowing it, such devoted love for the man who, in
+reality, abandoned her, that Prince Andras felt deeply moved and touched.
+He thought of the one leading a life of pleasure, and the other a life of
+fatigue; of this household touching on one side poverty, and, on the
+other, wealth and fashion; and he divined, from the innocent words of
+this young wife, the hardships of this home, half deserted by the
+husband, and the nervousness and peevishness of Jacquemin returning to
+this poor place after a night at the restaurants or a ball at Baroness
+Dinati's.  He heard the cutting voice of the elegant little man whom his
+humble wife contemplated with the eyes of a Hindoo adoring an idol; he
+was present, in imagination, at those tragically sorrowful scenes which
+the wife bore with her tender smile, poor woman, knowing of the life of
+her Paul only those duties of luxury which she herself imagined,
+remaining a seamstress still to sew the buttons on the shirts and gloves
+of her husband, and absolutely ignorant of all the entertainments where,
+in an evening, would sometimes be lost, at a game of cards, the whole
+monthly salary of Monsieur Puck!  And Zilah said to himself, that this
+was, perhaps, the first time that this woman had ever been brought in
+contact with anything pertaining to her husband's fashionable life--
+and in what shape?--that of a man who had come to demand satisfaction for
+an injury, and to say to Jacquemin: "I shall probably kill you,
+Monsieur!"
+
+And gradually, before the spectacle of this profound love, of this humble
+and holy devotion of the unselfish martyr with timid, wistful eyes, who
+leaned over her children, and said to them, sweetly, "Yes, you are
+hungry, I know, but you shall have papa's beefsteak," while she herself
+breakfasted off a little coffee and a crust of bread, Andras Zilah felt
+all his anger die away; and an immense pity filled his breast, as he saw,
+as in a vision of what the future might have brought forth, a terrible
+scene in this poor little household: the pale fair-haired wife, already
+wasted and worn with constant labor, leaning out of the window yonder,
+or running to the stairs and seeing, covered with blood, wounded, wounded
+to death perhaps, her Paul, whom he, Andras, had come to provoke to a
+duel.
+
+Ah!  poor woman!  Never would he cause her such anguish and sorrow.
+Between his sword and Jacquemin's impertinent little person, were now
+this sad-eyed creature, and those poor little children, who played there,
+forgotten, half deserted, by their father, and who would grow up, Heaven
+knows how!
+
+"I see that Monsieur Jacquemin will not return," he said, rising
+hurriedly, "and I will leave you to your breakfast, Madame."
+
+"Oh! you don't trouble me at all, Monsieur.  I beg your pardon again for
+having given my children their breakfast before you."
+
+"Farewell, Madame," said Andras, bowing with the deepest respect.
+
+"Then, you are really going, Monsieur?  Indeed, I am afraid he won't come
+back.  But please tell me what I shall say to him your errand was.  If it
+is some good news, I should be so glad, so glad, to be the first to tell
+it to him.  You are, perhaps, although you say not, the editor of some
+paper which is about to be started.  He spoke to me, the other day, of a
+new paper.  He would like to be a dramatic critic.  That is his dream, he
+says.  Is it that, Monsieur?"
+
+"No, Madame; and, to tell you the truth, there is no longer any need for
+me to see your husband.  But I do not regret my visit; on the contrary--
+I have met a noble woman, and I offer her my deepest respect."
+
+Poor, unhappy girl!  She was not used to such words; she blushingly
+faltered her thanks, and seemed quite grieved at the departure of this
+man, from whom she had expected some good luck for her husband.
+
+"The life of Paris has its secrets!"  thought Zilah, as he slowly
+descended the stairs, which he had mounted in such a different frame of
+mind, so short a time before.
+
+When he reached the lower landing, he looked up, and saw the blond head
+of the young woman, leaning over above, and the little hands of the
+children clutching the damp railing.
+
+Then Prince Andras Zilah took off his hat, and again bowed low.
+
+On his way from the Rue Rochechouart to his hotel he thought of the thin,
+pale face of the Parisian grisette, who would slowly pine away, deceived
+and disdained by the man whose name she bore.  Such a fine name!  Puck or
+Gavroche!
+
+"And she would die rather than soil that name.  This Jacquemin has found
+this pearl of great price, and hid it away under the gutters of Paris!
+And I--I have encountered--what?  A miserable woman who betrayed me!
+Ah! men and women are decidedly the victims of chance; puppets destined
+to bruise one another!"
+
+On entering his hotel, he found Yanski Varhely there, with an anxious
+look upon his rugged old face.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well-nothing!"
+
+And Zilah told his friend what he had seen.
+
+"A droll city, this Paris!"  he said, in conclusion.  "I see that it is
+necessary to go up into the garrets to know it well."
+
+He took a sheet of paper, sat down, and wrote as follows:
+
+     MONSIEUR:--You have published an article in regard to Prince Andras
+     Zilah, which is an outrage.  A devoted friend of the Prince had
+     resolved to make you pay dearly for it; but there is some one who
+     has disarmed him.  That some one is the admirable woman who bears so
+     honorably the name which you have given her, and lives so bravely
+     the life you have doomed her to.  Madame Jacquemin has redeemed the
+     infamy of Monsieur Puck.  But when, in the future, you have to speak
+     of the misfortunes of others, think a little of your own existence,
+     and profit by the moral lesson given you by--AN UNKNOWN.
+
+"Now," said Zilah, "be so kind, my dear Varhely, as to have this note
+sent to Monsieur Puck, at the office of 'L'Actualite' and ask your
+domestic to purchase some toys, whatever he likes--here is the money--
+and take them to Madame Jacquemin, No. 25 Rue Rochechouart.  Three toys,
+because there are three children.  The poor little things will have
+gained so much, at all events, from this occurrence."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+"AM I AVENGED?"
+
+After this episode, the Prince lived a more solitary existence than
+before, and troubled himself no further about the outside world.  Why
+should he care, that some penny-aliner had slipped those odious lines
+into a newspaper?  His sorrow was not the publishing of the treachery,
+it was the treachery itself; and his hourly suffering caused him to long
+for death to end his torture.
+
+"And yet I must live," he thought, "if to exist with a dagger through
+one's heart is to live."
+
+Then, to escape from the present, he plunged into the memories of the
+war, as into a bath of oblivion, a strange oblivion, where he found all
+his patriotic regrets of other days.  He read, with spasmodic eagerness,
+the books in which Georgei and Klapka, the actors of the drama, presented
+their excuses, or poured forth their complaints; and it seemed to him
+that his country would make him forget his love.
+
+In the magnificent picture-gallery, where he spent most of his time, his
+eyes rested upon the battle-scenes of Matejks, the Polish artist, and the
+landscapes of Munkacsy, that painter of his own country, who took his
+name from the town of Munkacs, where tradition says that the Magyars
+settled when they came from the Orient, ages ago.  Then a bitter longing
+took possession of him to breathe a different air, to fly from Paris, and
+place a wide distance between himself and Marsa; to take a trip around
+the world, where new scenes might soften his grief, or, better still,
+some accident put an end to his life; and, besides, chance might bring
+him in contact with Menko.
+
+But, just as he was ready to depart, a sort of lassitude overpowered him;
+he felt the inert sensation of a wounded man who has not the strength to
+move, and he remained where he was, sadly and bitterly wondering at times
+if he should not appeal to the courts, dissolve his marriage, and demand
+back his name from the one who had stolen it.
+
+Appeal to the courts?  The idea of doing that was repugnant to him.
+What! to hear the proud and stainless name of the Zilahs resound,
+no longer above the clash of sabres and the neighing of furious horses,
+but within the walls of a courtroom, and in presence of a gaping crowd
+of sensation seekers?  No! silence was better than that; anything was
+better than publicity and scandal.  Divorce!  He could obtain that, since
+Marsa, her mind destroyed, was like one dead.  And what would a divorce
+give him?  His freedom?  He had it already.  But what nothing could give
+back, was his ruined faith, his shattered hopes, his happiness lost
+forever.
+
+At times he had a wild desire to see Marsa again, and vent once more upon
+her his anger and contempt.  When he happened to see the name of Maisons-
+Lafitte, his body tingled from head to foot, as by an electric shock.
+Maisons!  The sunlit garden, the shaded alleys, the glowing parterres of
+flowers, the old oaks, the white-walled villa, all appeared before him,
+brutally distinct, like a lost, or rather poisoned, Eden!  And, besides,
+she, Marsa, was no longer there; and the thought that the woman whom he
+had so passionately loved, with her exquisite, flower-like face, was shut
+up among maniacs at Vaugirard, caused him the acutest agony.  The asylum
+which was Marsa's prison was so constantly in his mind that he felt the
+necessity of flight, in order not to allow his weakness to get the bettor
+of him, lest he should attempt to see Marsa again.
+
+"What a coward I am!"  he thought.
+
+One evening he announced to Varhely that he was going to the lonely villa
+of Sainte-Adresse, where they had so many times together watched the sea
+and talked of their country.
+
+"I am going there to be alone, my dear Yanski," he said, "but to be with
+you is to be with myself.  I hope that you will accompany me."
+
+"Most certainly," replied Varhely.
+
+The Prince took only one domestic, wishing to live as quietly and
+primitively as possible; but Varhely, really alarmed at the rapid change
+in the Prince, and the terrible pallor of his face, followed him, hoping
+at least to distract him and arouse him from his morbidness by talking
+over with him the great days of the past, and even, if possible, to
+interest him in the humble lives of the fishermen about him.
+
+Zilah and his friend, therefore, passed long hours upon the terrace of
+the villa, watching the sun set at their feet, while the grayish-blue sea
+was enveloped in a luminous mist, and the fading light was reflected upon
+the red walls and white blinds of the houses, and tinged with glowing
+purple the distant hills of Ingouville.
+
+This calm, quiet spot gradually produced upon Andras the salutary effect
+of a bath after a night of feverish excitement.  His reflections became
+less bitter, and, strange to relate, it was rough old Yanski Varhely,
+who, by his tenderness and thoughtfulness, led his friend to a more
+resigned frame of mind.
+
+Very often, after nightfall, would Zilah descend with him to the shore
+below.  The sea lay at their feet a plain of silver, and the moonbeams
+danced over the waves in broken lines of luminous atoms; boats passed to
+and fro, their red lights flashing like glowworms; and it seemed to
+Andras and Varhely, as they approached the sea, receding over the wet,
+gleaming sands, that they were walking upon quicksilver.
+
+As they strolled and talked together here, it seemed to Andras that this
+grief was, for the moment, carried away by the fresh, salt breeze; and
+these two men, in a different manner buffeted by fate, resembled two
+wounded soldiers who mutually aid one another to advance, and not to fall
+by the way before the combat is over.  Yanski made special efforts to
+rouse in Andras the old memories of his fatherland, and to inspire in him
+again his love for Hungary.
+
+"Ah! I used to have so many hopes and dreams for her future," said
+Andras; "but idealists have no chance in the world of to-day; so now I am
+a man who expects nothing of life except its ending.  And yet I would
+like to see once again that old stone castle where I grew up, full of
+hopes!  Hopes?  Bah!  pretty bubbles, that is all!"
+
+One morning they walked along the cliffs, past the low shanties of the
+fishermen, as far as Havre; and, as they were sauntering through the
+streets of the city, Varhely grasped the Prince's arm, and pointed to an
+announcement of a series of concerts to be given at Frascati by a band of
+Hungarian gipsies.
+
+"There," he said, "you will certainly emerge from your retreat to hear
+those airs once more."
+
+"Yes," replied Andras, after a moment's hesitation.
+
+That evening found him at the casino; but his wound seemed to open again,
+and his heart to be grasped as in an iron hand, as he listened to the
+plaintive cries and moans of the Tzigani music.  Had the strings of the
+bows played these czardas upon his own sinews, laid bare, he would not
+have trembled more violently.  Every note of the well-known airs fell
+upon his heart like a corrosive tear, and Marsa, in all her dark, tawny
+beauty, rose before him.  The Tzigani played now the waltzes which Marsa
+used to play; then the slow, sorrowful plaint of the "Song of Plevna;"
+and then the air of Janos Nemeth's, the heart-breaking melody, to the
+Prince like the lament of his life: 'The World holds but One Fair
+Maiden'.  And at every note he saw again Marsa, the one love of his
+existence.
+
+"Let us go!"  he said suddenly to Yanski.
+
+But, as they were about to leave the building, they almost ran into a
+laughing, merry group, led by the little Baroness Dinati, who uttered a
+cry of delight as she perceived Andras.
+
+"What, you, my dear Prince!  Oh, how glad I am to see you!"
+
+And she took his arm, all the clan which accompanied her stopping to
+greet Prince Zilah.
+
+"We have come from Etretat, and we are going back there immediately.
+There was a fair at Havre in the Quartier Saint-Francois, and we have
+eaten up all we could lay our hands on, broken all Aunt Sally's pipes,
+and purchased all the china horrors and hideous pincushions we could
+find.  They are all over there in the break.  We are going to raffle them
+at Etretat for the poor."
+
+The Prince tried to excuse himself and move on, but the little Baroness
+held him tight.
+
+"Why don't you come to Etretat?  It is charming there.  We don't do
+anything but eat and drink and talk scandal--Oh, yes!  Yamada sometimes
+gives us some music.  Come here, Yamada!"
+
+The Japanese approached, in obedience to her call, with his eternal grin
+upon his queer little face.
+
+"My dear Prince," rattled on the Baroness, "you don't know, perhaps, that
+Yamada is the most Parisian of Parisians?  Upon my word, these Japanese
+are the Parisians of Asia!  Just fancy what he has been doing at Etretat!
+He has been writing a French operetta!"
+
+"Japanese!" corrected Yamada, with an apologetic bow.
+
+"Oh, Japanese!  Parisian Japanese, then!  At all events, it is very
+funny, and the title is Little Moo-Moo!  There is a scene on board a
+flower-decked boat!  Oh, it is so amusing, so original, so natural!
+and a delightful song for Little Moo-Moo!"
+
+Then, as Zilah glanced at Varhely, uneasy, and anxious to get away, the
+Baroness puckered up her rosy lips and sang the stanzas of the Japanese
+maestro.
+
+Why, sung by Judic or Theo, it would create a furore!  All Paris would be
+singing.
+
+"Oh, by the way," she cried, suddenly interrupting herself, "what have you
+done to Jacquemin?  Yes, my friend Jacquemin?"
+
+"Jacquemin?"  repeated Zilah; and he thought of the garret in the Rue
+Rochechouart, and the gentle, fairhaired woman, who was probably at this
+very moment leaning over the cribs of her little children--the children
+of Monsieur Puck, society reporter of 'L'Actualite'
+
+"Yes!  Why, Jacquemin has become a savage; oh, indeed! a regular savage!
+I wanted to bring him to Etretat; but no, he wouldn't come.  It seems
+that he is married.  Jacquemin married!  Isn't it funny?  He didn't seem
+like a married man!  Poor fellow!  Well, when I invited him, he refused;
+and the other day, when I wanted to know the reason, he answered me (that
+is why I speak to you about it), 'Ask Prince Zilah'!  So, tell me now,
+what have you done to poor Jacquemin?"
+
+"Nothing," said the Prince.
+
+"Oh, yes, you have; you have changed him!  He, who used to go everywhere
+and be so jolly, now hides himself in his den, and is never seen at all.
+Just see how disagreeable it is!  If he had come with us, he would have
+written an account in 'L'Actualite' of Little Moo-Moo, and Yamada's
+operetta would already be celebrated."
+
+"So," continued the Baroness, "when I return to Paris, I am going to hunt
+him up.  A reporter has no right to make a bear of himself!"
+
+"Don't disturb him, if he cares for his home now," said Zilah, gravely.
+"Nothing can compensate for one's own fireside, if one loves and is
+loved."
+
+At the first words of the Prince, the Baroness suddenly became serious.
+
+"I beg your pardon," she said, dropping his arm and holding out her tiny
+hand: "please forgive me for having annoyed you.  Oh, yes, I see it!
+I have annoyed you.  But be consoled; we are going at once, and then,
+you know, that if there is a creature who loves you, respects you,
+and is devoted to you, it is this little idiot of a Baroness!
+Goodnight!"
+
+"Good-night'."  said Andras, bowing to the Baroness's friends, Yamada and
+the other Parisian exotics.
+
+Glad to escape, Varhely and the Prince returned home along the seashore.
+Fragments of the czardas from the illuminated casino reached their ears
+above the swish of the waves.  Andras felt irritated and nervous.
+Everything recalled to him Marsa, and she seemed to be once more taking
+possession of his heart, as a vine puts forth fresh tendrils and clings
+again to the oak after it has been torn away.
+
+"She also suffers!"  he said aloud, after they had walked some distance
+in silence.
+
+"Fortunately!"  growled Varhely; and then, as if he wished to efface his
+harshness, he added, in a voice which trembled a little: "And for that
+reason she is, perhaps, not unworthy of pardon."
+
+"Pardon!"
+
+This cry escaped from Zilah in accents of pain which struck Varhely like
+a knife.
+
+"Pardon before punishing--the other!"  exclaimed the Prince, angrily.
+
+The other!  Yanski Varhely instinctively clinched his fist, thinking,
+with rage, of that package of letters which he had held in his hands,
+and which he might have destroyed if he had known.
+
+It was true: how was pardon possible while Menko lived?
+
+No word more was spoken by either until they reached the villa; then
+Prince Zilah shook Yanski's hand and retired to his chamber.  Lighting
+his lamp, he took out and read and reread, for the hundredth time
+perhaps, certain letters--letters not addressed to him--those letters
+which Varhely had handed him, and with which Michel Menko had practically
+struck him the day of his marriage.
+
+Andras had kept them, reading them over at times with an eager desire for
+further suffering, drinking in this species of poison to irritate his
+mental pain as he would have injected morphine to soothe a physical one.
+These letters caused him a sensation analogous to that which gives repose
+to opium-eaters, a cruel shock at first, sharp as the prick of a knife,
+then, the pain slowly dying away, a heavy stupor.
+
+The whole story was revived in these letters of Marsa to Menko:--all the
+ignorant, credulous love of the young girl for Michel, then her
+enthusiasm for love itself, rather than for the object of her love,
+and then, again--for Menko had reserved nothing, but sent all together--
+the bitter contempt of Marsa, deceived, for the man who had lied to her.
+
+There were, in these notes, a freshness of sentiment and a youthful
+credulity which produced the impression of a clear morning in early
+spring, all the frankness and faith of a mind ignorant of evil and
+destitute of guile; then, in the later ones, the spontaneous outburst of
+a heart which believes it has given itself forever, because it thinks it
+has encountered incorruptible loyalty and undying devotion.
+
+As he read them over, Andras shook with anger against the two who had
+deceived him; and also, and involuntarily, he felt an indefined, timid
+pity for the woman who had trusted and been deceived--a pity he
+immediately drove away, as if he were afraid of himself, afraid of
+forgiving.
+
+"What did Varhely mean by speaking to me of pardon?"  he thought.  "Am I
+yet avenged?"
+
+It was this constant hope that the day would come when justice would be
+meted out to Menko's treachery.  The letters proved conclusively that
+Menko had been Marsa's lover; but they proved, at the same time, that
+Michel had taken advantage of her innocence and ignorance, and lied
+outrageously in representing himself as free, when he was already bound
+to another woman.
+
+All night long Andras Zilah sat there, inflicting torture upon himself,
+and taking a bitter delight in his own suffering; engraving upon his
+memory every word of love written by Marsa to Michel, as if he felt the
+need of fresh pain to give new strength to his hatred.
+
+The next morning at breakfast, Varhely astonished him by announcing that
+he was going away.
+
+"To Paris?"
+
+"No, to Vienna," replied Yanski, who looked somewhat paler than usual.
+
+"What an idea!  What are you going to do there, Varhely?"
+
+"Angelo Valla arrived yesterday at Havre.  He sent for me to come to his
+hotel this morning.  I have just been there.  Valla has given me some
+information in regard to a matter of interest to myself, which will
+require my presence at Vienna.  So I am going there."
+
+Prince Zilah was intimately acquainted with the Valla of whom Varhely
+spoke; he had been one of the witnesses of his marriage.  Valla was a
+former minister of Manin; and, since the siege of Venice, he had lived
+partly in Paris and partly in Florence.  He was a man for whom Andras
+Zilah had the greatest regard.
+
+"When do you go?"  asked the Prince of Varhely.
+
+"In an hour.  I wish to take the fast mail from Paris this evening."
+
+"Is it so very pressing, then?"
+
+"Very pressing," replied Varhely.  "There is another to whose ears the
+affair may possibly come, and I wish to get the start of him."
+
+"Farewell, then," said Andras, considerably surprised; "come back as soon
+as you can."
+
+He was astonished at the almost violent pressure of the hand which
+Varhely gave him, as if he were departing for a very long journey.
+
+"Why didn't Valla come to see me?"  he asked.  "He is one of the few I am
+always glad to see."
+
+"He had no time.  He had to be away again at once, and he asked me to
+excuse him to you."
+
+The Prince did not make any further attempt to find out what was the
+reason of his friend's sudden flight, for Varhely was already descending
+the steps of the villa.
+
+Andras then felt a profound sensation of loneliness, and he thought again
+of the woman whom his imagination pictured haggard and wan in the asylum
+of Vaugirard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+"WHAT MATTERS IT HOW MUCH WE SUFFER?"
+
+Two hours after Varhely had gone, a sort of feverish attraction drew
+Prince Andras to the spot where, the night before, he had listened to the
+Tzigana airs.
+
+Again, but alone this time, he drank in the accents of the music of his
+country, and sought to remember the impression produced upon him when
+Marsa had played this air or that one, this sad song or that czardas.
+He saw her again as she stood on the deck of the steamer, watching the
+children on the barge as they threw her kisses of farewell.  More
+troubled than ever, nervous and suffering, Zilah returned home late in
+the afternoon, opened the desk where he kept Marsa's letters, and one by
+one, impelled by some inexplicable sentiment, he burned them, the flame
+of the candle devouring the paper, whose subtle perfume mounted to his
+nostrils for the last time like a dying sigh, while the wind carried off,
+through the window into the infinite, the black dust of those fateful
+letters, those remnants of dead passion and of love betrayed--and the
+past was swept away.
+
+The sun was slowly descending in an atmosphere of fire, while toward
+Havre a silvery mist over the hills and shore heralded the approach of
+chaste Dian's reign.  The reflections of the sunset tinged with red and
+orange the fishing boats floating over the calm sea, while a long fiery
+streak marked the water on the horizon, growing narrower and narrower,
+and changing to orange and then to pale yellow as the disk of the sun
+gradually disappeared, and the night came on, enveloping the now inactive
+city, and the man who watched the disappearance of the last fragments of
+a detested love, of the love of another, of a love which had torn and
+bruised his heart.  And, strange to say, for some inexplicable reason,
+Prince Andras Zilah now regretted the destruction of those odious
+letters.  It seemed to him, with a singular displacement of his
+personality, that it was something of himself, since it was something of
+her, that he had destroyed.  He had hushed that voice which said to
+another, "I love you," but which caused him the same thrill as if she had
+murmured the words for him.  They were letters received by his rival
+which the wind carried out, an impalpable dust, over the sea; and he felt
+--such folly is the human heart capable of--the bitter regret of a man
+who has destroyed a little of his past.
+
+The shadows crept over him at the same time that they crept over the sea.
+
+"What matters it how much we suffer, or how much suffering we cause," he
+murmured, "when, of all our loves, our hearts, ourselves, there remains,
+after a short lapse of time--what?  That!"  And he watched the last atom
+of burned paper float away in the deepening twilight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE STRICKEN SOUL
+
+His loneliness now weighed heavily upon Andras.  His nerves were shaken
+by the memories which the czardas of the Tzigani musicians had evoked;
+and it seemed to him that the place was deserted now that they had
+departed, and Varhely had gone with them.  In the eternal symphony of the
+sea, the lapping of the waves upon the shingle at the foot of the
+terrace, one note was now lacking, the resonant note of the czimbalom
+yonder in the gardens of Frascati.  The vibration of the czimbalom was
+like a call summoning up the image of Marsa, and this image took
+invincible possession of the Prince, who, with a sort of sorrowful anger
+which he regarded as hatred, tried in vain to drive it away.
+
+What was the use of remaining at Sainte-Adresse, when the memories he
+sought to flee came to find him there, and since Marsa's presence haunted
+it as if she had lived there by his side?
+
+He quitted Havre, and returned to Paris; but the very evening of his
+return, in the bustle and movement of the Champs-Elysees, the long avenue
+dotted with lights, the flaming gas-jets of the cafe concerts, the bursts
+of music, he found again, as if the Tzigana were continually pursuing
+him, the same phantom; despite the noise of people and carriages upon the
+asphalt, the echoes of the "Song of Plevna," played quite near him by
+some Hungarian orchestra, reached him as upon the seashore at Havre; and
+he hastened back to his hotel, to shut himself up, to hear nothing, see
+nothing, and escape from the fantastic, haunting pursuit of this
+inevitable vision.
+
+He could not sleep; fever burned in his blood.  He rose, and tried to
+read; but before the printed page he saw continually Marsa Laszlo, like
+the spectre of his happiness.
+
+"How cowardly human nature is!"  he exclaimed, hurling away the book.
+"Is it possible that I love her still?  Shall I love her forever?"
+
+And he felt intense self-contempt at the temptation which took possession
+of him to see once more Maisons-Lafitte, where he had experienced the
+most terrible grief of his life.  What was the use of struggling?  He had
+not forgotten, and he never could forget.
+
+If he had been sincere with himself, he would have confessed that he was
+impelled by his ever-living, ever-present love toward everything which
+would recall Marsa to him, and that a violent, almost superhuman effort
+was necessary not to yield to the temptation.
+
+About a week after the Prince's return to Paris, his valet appeared one
+day with the card of General Vogotzine.  It was on Andras's lips to
+refuse to see him; but, in reality, the General's visit caused him a
+delight which he would not acknowledge to himself.  He was about to hear
+of hey.  He told the valet to admit Vogotzine, hypocritically saying to
+himself that it was impossible, discourteous, not to receive him.
+
+The old Russian entered, timid and embarrassed, and was not much
+reassured by Zilah's polite but cold greeting.
+
+The General, who for some extraordinary reason had not had recourse to
+alcohol to give him courage, took the chair offered him by the Prince.
+He was a little flushed, not knowing exactly how to begin what he had to
+say; and, being sober, he was terribly afraid of appearing, like an
+idiot.
+
+"This is what is the matter," he said, plunging at once in medias res.
+"Doctor Fargeas, who sent me, might have come himself; but he thought
+that I, being her uncle, should--"
+
+"You have come to consult me about Marsa," said Andras, unconsciously
+glad to pronounce her name.
+
+"Yes," began the General, becoming suddenly intimidated, "of--of Marsa.
+She is very ill-Marsa is.  Very ill.  Stupor, Fargeas says.  She does not
+say a word-nothing.  A regular automaton!  It is terrible to see her--
+terrible--terrible."
+
+He raised his round, uneasy eyes to Andras, who was striving to appear
+calm, but whose lips twitched nervously.
+
+"It is impossible to rouse her," continued Vogotzine.  "The, doctors can
+do nothing.  There is no hope except in an--an--an experiment."
+
+"An experiment?"
+
+"Yes, exactly, exactly--an experiment.  You see he--he wanted to know if
+--(you must pardon me for what I am about to propose; it is Doctor
+Fargeas's idea)--You see--if--if--she should see--(I suppose--these are
+not my words)--if she should see you again at Doctor Sims's establishment
+--the emotion--the--the--Well, I don't know exactly what Doctor Fargeas
+does hope; but I have repeated to you his words--I am simply, quite
+simply, his messenger."
+
+"The doctor," said Andras, calmly, "would like--your niece to see me
+again?"
+
+"Yes, yes; and speak to you.  You see, you are the only one for whom--"
+
+The Prince interrupted the General, who instantly became as mute as if he
+were in the presence of the Czar.
+
+"It is well.  But what Doctor Fargeas asks of me will cause me intense
+suffering."
+
+Vogotzine did not open his lips.
+
+"See her again?  He wishes to revive all my sorrow, then!"
+
+Vogotzine waited, motionless as if on parade.
+
+After a moment or two, Andras saying no more, the General thought that he
+might speak.
+
+"I understand.  I knew very well what your answer would be.  I told the
+doctor so; but he replied, 'It is a question of humanity.  The Prince
+will not refuse.'"
+
+Fargeas must have known Prince Zilah's character well when he used the
+word humanity.  The Prince would not have refused his pity to the lowest
+of human beings; and so, never mind what his sufferings might be, if his
+presence could do any good, he must obey the doctor.
+
+"When does Doctor Fargeas wish me to go?"
+
+"Whenever you choose.  The doctor is just now at Vaugirard, on a visit to
+his colleague, and--"
+
+"Do not let us keep him waiting!"
+
+Vogotzine's eyes brightened.
+
+"Then you consent?  You will go?"
+
+He tried to utter some word of thanks, but Andras cut him short, saying:
+
+"I will order the carriage."
+
+"I have a carriage," said Vogotzine, joyously.  "We can go at once."
+
+Zilah was silent during the drive; and Vogotzine gazed steadily out of
+the window, without saying a word, as the Prince showed no desire to
+converse.
+
+They stopped before a high house, evidently built in the last century,
+and which was probably formerly a convent.  The General descended heavily
+from the coupe, rang the bell, and stood aside to let Zilah pass before
+him.
+
+The Prince's emotion was betrayed in a certain stiffness of demeanor, and
+in his slow walk, as if every movement cost him an effort.  He stroked
+his moustache mechanically, and glanced about the garden they were
+crossing, as if he expected to see Marsa at once.
+
+Dr. Fargeas appeared very much pleased to see the Prince, and he thanked
+him warmly for having come.  A thin, light-haired man, with a pensive
+look and superb eyes, accompanied Fargeas, and the physician introduced
+him to the Prince as Dr. Sims.
+
+Dr. Sims shared the opinion of his colleague.  Having taken the invalid
+away, and separated her from every thing that could recall the past, the
+physicians thought, that, by suddenly confronting her with a person so
+dear to her as Prince Zilah, the shock and emotion might rouse her from
+her morbid state.
+
+Fargeas explained to the Prince why he had thought it best to transport
+the invalid from Maisons-Lafitte to Vaugirard, and he thanked him for
+having approved of his determination.
+
+Zilah noticed that Fargeas, in speaking of Marsa, gave her no name or
+title.  With his usual tact, the doctor had divined the separation; and
+he did not call Marsa the Princess, but, in tones full of pity, spoke of
+her as the invalid.
+
+"She is in the garden," said Dr. Sims, when Fargeas had finished
+speaking.  "Will you see her now?"
+
+"Yes," said the Prince, in a voice that trembled slightly, despite his
+efforts to control it.
+
+"We will take a look at her first; and then, if you will be so kind, show
+yourself to her suddenly.  It is only an experiment we are making.  If
+she does not recognize you, her condition is graver than I think.  If she
+does recognize you, well, I hope that we shall be able to cure her.
+Come!"
+
+Dr. Sims motioned the Prince to precede them.
+
+"Shall I accompany you, gentlemen?"  asked Vogotzine.
+
+"Certainly, General!"
+
+"You see, I don't like lunatics; they produce a singular effect upon me;
+they don't interest me at all.  But still, after all, she is my niece!"
+
+And he gave a sharp pull to his frock-coat, as he would have tightened
+his belt before an assault.
+
+They descended a short flight of steps, and found themselves in a large
+garden, with trees a century old, beneath which were several men and
+women walking about or sitting in chairs.
+
+A large, new building, one story high, appeared at one end of the garden;
+in this were the dormitories of Dr. Sims's patients.
+
+"Are those people insane?"  asked Zilah, pointing to the peaceful groups.
+
+"Yes," said Dr. Sims; "it requires a stretch of the imagination to
+believe it, does it not?  You can speak to them as we pass by.  All these
+here are harmless."
+
+"Shall we cross the garden?"
+
+"Our invalid is below there, in another garden, behind that house."
+
+As he passed by, Zilah glanced curiously at these poor beings, who bowed,
+or exchanged a few words with the two physicians.  It seemed to him that
+they had the happy look of people who had reached the desired goal.
+Vogotzine, coughing nervously, kept close to the Prince and felt very ill
+at ease.  Andras, on the contrary, found great difficulty in realizing
+that he was really among lunatics.
+
+"See," said Dr. Sims, pointing out an old gentleman, dressed in the style
+of 1840, like an old-fashioned lithograph of a beau of the time of
+Gavarni, "that man has been more than thirty-five years in the
+institution.  He will not change the cut of his garments, and he is very
+careful to have his tailor make his clothes in the same style he dressed
+when he was young.  He is very happy.  He thinks that he is the enchanter
+Merlin, and he listens to Vivian, who makes appointments with him under
+the trees."
+
+As they passed the old man, his neck imprisoned in a high stock, his
+surtout cut long and very tight in the waist, and his trousers very full
+about the hips and very close about the ankles, he bowed politely.
+
+"Good-morning, Doctor Sims!  Good-morning, Doctor Fargeas!"
+
+Then, as the director of the establishment approached to speak, he placed
+a finger upon his lips:
+
+"Hush," he said.  "She is there!  Don't speak, or she will go away."  And
+he pointed with a sort of passionate veneration to an elm where Vivian
+was shut up, and whence she would shortly emerge.
+
+"Poor devil!"  murmured Vogotzine.
+
+This was not what Zilah thought, however.  He wondered if this happy
+hallucination which had lasted so many years, these eternal love-scenes
+with Vivian, love-scenes which never grew stale, despite the years and
+the wrinkles, were not the ideal form of happiness for a being condemned
+to this earth.  This poetical monomaniac lived with his dreams realized,
+finding, in an asylum of Vaugirard, all the fascinations and chimeras of
+the Breton land of golden blossoms and pink heather, all the
+intoxicating, languorous charm of the forest of Broceliande.
+
+"He has within his grasp what Shakespeare was content only to dream of.
+Insanity is, perhaps, simply the ideal realized:"
+
+"Ah!"  replied Dr. Fargeas, "but the real never loses its grip.  Why does
+this monomaniac preserve both the garments of his youth, which prevent
+him from feeling his age, and the dream of his life, which consoles him
+for his lost reason?  Because he is rich.  He can pay the tailor who
+dresses him, the rent of the pavilion he inhabits by himself, and the
+special servants who serve him.  If he were poor, he would suffer."
+
+"Then," said Zilah, "the question of bread comes up everywhere, even in
+insanity."
+
+"And money is perhaps happiness, since it allows of the purchase of
+happiness."
+
+"Oh!" said the Prince, "for me, happiness would be--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Forgetfulness."
+
+And he followed with his eyes Vivian's lover, who now had his ear glued
+to the trunk of the tree, and was listening to the voice which spoke only
+to him.
+
+"That man yonder," said Dr. Sims, indicating a man, still young, who was
+coming toward them, "is a talented writer whose novels you have doubtless
+read, and who has lost all idea of his own personality.  Once a great
+reader, he now holds all literature in intense disgust; from having
+written so much, he has grown to have a perfect horror of words and
+letters, and he never opens either a book or a newspaper.  He drinks in
+the fresh air, cultivates flowers, and watches the trains pass at the
+foot of the garden."
+
+"Is he happy?"  asked Andras.
+
+"Very happy."
+
+"Yes, he has drunk of the waters of Lethe," rejoined the Prince.
+
+"I will not tell you his name," whispered Dr. Sims, as the man, a thin,
+dark-haired, delicate-featured fellow, approached them; "but, if you
+should speak to him and chance to mention his name, he would respond
+'Ah!  yes, I knew him.  He was a man of talent, much talent.'  There
+is nothing left to him of his former life."
+
+And Zilah thought again that it was a fortunate lot to be attacked by one
+of these cerebral maladies where the entire being, with its burden of
+sorrows, is plunged into the deep, dark gulf of oblivion.
+
+The novelist stopped before the two physicians.
+
+"The mid-day train was three minutes and a half late," he said, quietly:
+"I mention the fact to you, doctor, that you may have it attended to.
+It is a very serious thing; for I am in the habit of setting my watch
+by that train."
+
+"I will see to it," replied Dr. Sims.  "By the way, do you want any
+books?"
+
+In the same quiet tone the other responded:
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To read."
+
+"What is the use of that?"
+
+"Or any newspapers?  To know--"
+
+"To know what?"  he interrupted, speaking with extreme volubility.
+"No, indeed!  It is so good to know nothing, nothing, nothing!  Do the
+newspapers announce that there are no more wars, no more poverty,
+illness, murders, envy, hatred or jealousy?  No!  The newspapers do not
+announce that.  Then, why should I read the newspapers?  Good-day,
+gentlemen."
+
+The Prince shuddered at the bitter logic of this madman, speaking with
+the shrill distinctness of the insane.  But Vogotzine smiled.
+
+"Why, these idiots have rather good sense, after all," he remarked.
+
+When they reached the end of the garden, Dr. Sims opened a gate which
+separated the male from the female patients, and Andras perceived several
+women walking about in the alleys, some of them alone, and some
+accompanied by attendants.  In the distance, separated from the garden by
+a ditch and a high wall, was the railway.
+
+Zilah caught his breath as he entered the enclosure, where doubtless
+among the female forms before him was that of the one he had loved.  He
+turned to Dr. Sims with anxious eyes, and asked:
+
+"Is she here?"
+
+"She is here," replied the doctor.
+
+The Prince hesitated to advance.  He had not seen her since the day he
+had felt tempted to kill her as she lay in her white robes at his feet.
+He wondered if it were not better to retrace his steps and depart hastily
+without seeing her.
+
+"This way," said Fargeas.  "We can see through the bushes without being
+seen, can we not, Sims?"
+
+"Yes, doctor."
+
+Zilah resigned himself to his fate; and followed the physicians without
+saying a word; he could hear the panting respiration of Vogotzine
+trudging along behind him.  All at once the Prince felt a sensation as of
+a heavy hand resting upon his heart.  Fargeas had exclaimed:
+
+"There she is!"
+
+He pointed, through the branches of the lilac-bushes, to two women who
+were approaching with slow steps, one a light-haired woman in a nurse's
+dress, and the other in black garments, as if in mourning for her own
+life, Marsa herself.
+
+Marsa!  She was coming toward Zilah; in a moment, he would be able to
+touch her, if he wished, through the leaves!  Even Vogotzine held his
+breath.
+
+Zilah eagerly questioned Marsa's face, as if to read thereon a secret,
+to decipher a name--Menko's or his own.  Her exquisite, delicate features
+had the rigidity of marble; her dark eyes were staring straight ahead,
+like two spots of light, where nothing, nothing was reflected.  Zilah
+shuddered again; she alarmed him.
+
+Alarm and pity!  He longed to thrust aside the bushes, and hasten with
+extended arms toward the pale vision before him.  It was as if the moving
+spectre of his love were passing by.  But, with a strong effort of will,
+he remained motionless where he was.
+
+Old Vogotzine seemed very ill at ease.  Dr. Fargeas was very calm; and,
+after a questioning glance at his colleague, he said distinctly to the
+Prince:
+
+"Now you must show yourself!"
+
+The physician's order, far from displeasing Zilah, was like music in his
+ears.  He was beginning to doubt, if, after all, Fargeas intended to
+attempt the experiment.  He longed, with keen desire, to speak to Marsa;
+to know if his look, his breath, like a puff of wind over dying ashes,
+would not rekindle a spark of life in those dull, glassy eyes.
+
+What was she thinking of, if she thought at all?  What memory vacillated
+to and fro in that vacant brain?  The memory of himself, or of--the
+other?  He must know, he must know!
+
+"This way," said Dr. Sims.  "We will go to the end of the alley, and meet
+her face to face."
+
+"Courage!"  whispered Fargeas.
+
+Zilah followed; and, in a few steps, they reached the end of the alley,
+and stood beneath a clump of leafy trees.  The Prince saw, coming to him,
+with a slow but not heavy step, Marsa--no, another Marsa, the spectre or
+statue of Marsa.
+
+Fargeas made a sign to Vogotzine, and the Russian and the two doctors
+concealed themselves behind the trees.
+
+Zilah, trembling with emotion, remained alone in the middle of the walk.
+
+The nurse who attended Marsa, had doubtless received instructions from
+Dr. Sims; for, as she perceived the Prince, she fell back two or three
+paces, and allowed Marsa to go on alone.
+
+Lost in her stupor, the Tzigana advanced, her dark hair ruffled by the
+wind; and, still beautiful although so thin, she moved on, without seeing
+anything, her lips closed as if sealed by death, until she was not three
+feet from Zilah.
+
+He stood waiting, his blue eyes devouring her with a look, in which there
+were mingled love, pity, and anger.  When the Tzigana reached him, and
+nearly ran into him in her slow walk, she stopped suddenly, like an
+automaton.  The instinct of an obstacle before her arrested her, and she
+stood still, neither recoiling nor advancing.
+
+A few steps away, Dr. Fargeas and Dr. Sims studied her stony look, in
+which there was as yet neither thought nor vision.
+
+Still enveloped in her stupor, she stood there, her eyes riveted upon
+Andras.  Suddenly, as if an invisible knife had been plunged into her
+heart, she started back.  Her pale marble face became transfigured, and
+an expression of wild terror swept across her features; shaking with a
+nervous trembling, she tried to call out, and a shrill cry, which rent
+the air, burst from her lips, half open, like those of a tragic mask.
+Her two arms were stretched out with the hands clasped; and, falling upon
+her knees, she--whose light of reason had been extinguished, who for so
+many days had only murmured the sad, singing refrain: "I do not know; I
+do not know!"--faltered, in a voice broken with sobs: "Forgive!
+Forgive!"
+
+Then her face became livid, and she would have fallen back unconscious if
+Zilah had not stooped over and caught her in his arms.
+
+Dr. Sims hastened forward, and, aided by the nurse, relieved him of his
+burden.
+
+Poor Vogotzine was as purple as if he had had a stroke of apoplexy.
+
+"But, gentlemen," said the Prince, his eyes burning with hot tears, "it
+will be horrible if we have killed her!"
+
+"No, no," responded Fargeas; "we have only killed her stupor.  Now leave
+her to us.  Am I not right, my dear Sims?  She can and must be cured!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+"LET THE DEAD PAST BURY ITS DEAD"
+
+Prince Andras had heard no news of Varhely for a long time.  He only knew
+that the Count was in Vienna.
+
+Yanski had told the truth when he said that he had been summoned away by
+his friend, Angelo Valla.
+
+They were very much astonished, at the Austrian ministry of foreign
+affairs, to see Count Yanski Varhely, who, doubtless, had come from Paris
+to ask some favor of the minister.  The Austrian diplomats smiled as they
+heard the name of the old soldier of '48 and '49.  So, the famous fusion
+of parties proclaimed in 1875 continued!  Every day some sulker of former
+times rallied to the standard.  Here was this Varhely, who, at one time,
+if he had set foot in Austria-Hungary, would have been speedily cast into
+the Charles barracks, the jail of political prisoners, now sending in his
+card to the minister of the Emperor; and doubtless the minister and the
+old commander of hussars would, some evening, together pledge the new
+star of Hungary, in a beaker of rosy Crement!
+
+"These are queer days we live in!"  thought the Austrian diplomats.
+
+The minister, of whom Yanski Varhely demanded an audience, his Excellency
+Count Josef Ladany, had formerly commanded a legion of Magyar students,
+greatly feared by the grenadiers of Paskiewisch, in Hungary.  The
+soldiers of Josef Ladany, after threatening to march upon Vienna, had
+many times held in check the grenadiers and Cossacks of the field-
+marshal.  Spirited and enthusiastic, his fair hair floating above his
+youthful forehead like an aureole, Ladany made war like a patriot and a
+poet, reciting the verses of Petoefi about the camp-fires, and setting
+out for battle as for a ball.  He was magnificent (Varhely remembered him
+well) at the head of his students, and his floating, yellow moustaches
+had caused the heart of more than one little Hungarian patriot to beat
+more quickly.
+
+Varhely would experience real pleasure in meeting once more his old
+companion in arms.  He remembered one afternoon in the vineyards, when
+his hussars, despite the obstacles of the vines and the irregular ground,
+had extricated Ladany's legion from the attack of two regiments of
+Russian infantry.  Joseph Ladany was standing erect upon one of his
+cannon for which the gunners had no more ammunition, and, with drawn
+sabre, was rallying his companions, who were beginning to give way before
+the enemy.  Ah, brave Ladany!  With what pleasure would Varhely grasp his
+hand!
+
+The former leader had doubtless aged terribly--he must be a man of fifty-
+five or fifty-six, to-day; but Varhely was sure that Joseph Ladany, now
+become minister, had preserved his generous, ardent nature of other days.
+
+As he crossed the antechambers and lofty halls which led to the
+minister's office, Varhely still saw, in his mind's eye, Ladany, sabre in
+hand, astride of the smoking cannon.
+
+An usher introduced him into a large, severe-looking room, with a lofty
+chimney-piece, above which hung a picture of the Emperor-King in full
+military uniform.  Varhely at first perceived only some large armchairs,
+and an enormous desk covered with books; but, in a moment, from behind
+the mass of volumes, a man emerged, smiling, and with outstretched hand:
+the old hussar was amazed to find himself in the presence of a species of
+English diplomat, bald, with long, gray side-whiskers and shaven lip and
+chin, and scrupulously well dressed.
+
+Yanski's astonishment was so evident that Josef Ladany said, still
+smiling:
+
+"Well, don't you recognize me, my dear Count?"  His voice was pleasant,
+and his manner charming; but there was something cold and politic in his
+whole appearance which absolutely stupefied Varhely.  If he had seen him
+pass in the street, he would never have recognized, in this elegant
+personage, the young man, with yellow hair and long moustaches, who sang
+war songs as he sabred the enemy.
+
+And yet it was indeed Ladany; it was the same clear eye which had once
+commanded his legion with a single look; but the eye was often veiled now
+beneath a lowered eyelid, and only now and then did a glance shoot forth
+which seemed to penetrate a man's most secret thoughts.  The soldier had
+become the diplomat.
+
+"I had forgotten that thirty years have passed!"  thought Varhely, a
+little saddened.
+
+Count Ladany made his old comrade sit down in one of the armchairs, and
+questioned him smilingly as to his life, his friendships, Paris, Prince
+Zilah, and led him gradually and gracefully to confide what he, Varhely,
+had come to ask of the minister of the Emperor of Austria.
+
+Varhely felt more reassured.  Josef Ladany seemed to him to have remained
+morally the same.  The moustache had been cut off, the yellow hair had
+fallen; but the heart was still young and without doubt Hungarian.
+
+"You can," he said, abruptly, "render me a service, a great service.
+I have never before asked anything of anybody; but I have taken this
+journey expressly to see you, and to ask you, to beg you rather, to--"
+
+"Go on, my dear Count.  What you desire will be realized, I hope."
+
+But his tone had already become colder, or perhaps simply more official.
+
+"Well," continued Varhely, "what I have come to ask of you is; in memory
+of the time when we were brothers in arms" (the minister started
+slightly, and stroked his whiskers a little nervously), "the liberty of a
+certain man, of a man whom you know."
+
+"Ah! indeed!"  said Count Josef.
+
+He leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and, through
+his half-opened eyelids, examined Varhely, who looked him boldly in the
+face.
+
+The contrast between these two men was striking; the soldier with his
+hair and moustache whitened in the harness, and the elegant government
+official with his polished manners; two old-time companions who had heard
+the whistling of the same balls.
+
+"This is my errand," said Varhely.  "I have the greatest desire that one
+of our compatriots, now a prisoner in Warsaw, I think--at all events,
+arrested at Warsaw a short time ago--should be set at liberty.  It is of
+the utmost importance to me," he added, his lips turning almost as white
+as his moustache.
+
+"Oh!"  said the minister.  "I fancy I know whom you mean."
+
+"Count Menko."
+
+"Exactly!  Menko was arrested by the Russian police on his arrival at the
+house of a certain Labanoff, or Ladanoff--almost my name in Russian.
+This Labanoff, who had lately arrived from Paris, is suspected of a plot
+against the Czar.  He is not a nihilist, but simply a malcontent; and,
+besides that, his brain is not altogether right.  In short, Count Menko
+is connected in some way, I don't know how, with this Labanoff.  He went
+to Poland to join him, and the Russian police seized him.  I think myself
+that they were quite right in their action."
+
+"Possibly," said Varhely; "but I do not care to discuss the right of the
+Russian police to defend themselves or the Czar.  What I have come for is
+to ask you to use your influence with the Russian Government to obtain
+Menko's release."
+
+"Are you very much interested in Menko?"
+
+"Very much," replied Yanski, in a tone which struck the minister as
+rather peculiar.
+
+"Then," asked Count Ladany with studied slowness, "you would like?--"
+
+"A note from you to the Russian ambassador, demanding Menko's release.
+Angelo Valla--you know him--Manin's former minister--"
+
+"Yes, I know," said Count Josef, with his enigmatical smile.
+
+"Valla told me of Menko's arrest.  I knew that Menko had left Paris, and
+I was very anxious to find where he had gone.  Valla learned, at the
+Italian embassy in Paris, of the affair of this Labanoff and of the real
+or apparent complicity of Michel Menko; and he told me about it.  When we
+were talking over the means of obtaining the release of a man held by
+Muscovite authority, which is not an easy thing, I know, we thought of
+you, and I have come to your Excellency as I would have gone to the chief
+of the Legion of Students to demand his aid in a case of danger!"
+
+Yanski Varhely was no diplomat; and his manner of appealing to the
+memories of the past was excessively disagreeable to the minister, who,
+however, allowed no signs of his annoyance to appear.
+
+Count Ladany was perfectly well acquainted with the Warsaw affair.  As an
+Hungarian was mixed up in it, and an Hungarian of the rank and standing
+of Count Menko, the Austro-Hungarian authorities had immediately been
+advised of the whole proceeding.  There were probably no proofs of actual
+complicity against Menko; but, as Josef Ladany had said, it seemed
+evident that he had come to Poland to join Labanoff.  An address given to
+Menko by Labanoff had been found, and both were soon to depart for St.
+Petersburg.  Labanoff had some doubtful acquaintances in the Russian
+army: several officers of artillery, who had been arrested and sent to
+the mines, were said to be his friends.
+
+"The matter is a grave one," said the Count.  "We can scarcely, for one
+particular case, make our relations more strained with a--a friendly
+nation, relations which so many others--I leave you to divine who, my
+dear Varhely--strive to render difficult.  And yet, I would like to
+oblige you; I would, I assure you."
+
+"If Count Menko is not set at liberty, what will happen to him?"  asked
+Yanski.
+
+"Hmm--he might, although a foreigner, be forced to take a journey to
+Siberia."
+
+"Siberia!  That is a long distance off, and few return from that
+journey," said Varhely, his voice becoming almost hoarse.  "I would give
+anything in the world if Menko were free!"
+
+"It would have been so easy for him not to have been seized by the
+Russian police."
+
+"Yes; but he is.  And, I repeat, I have come to you to demand his
+release.  Damn it!  Such a demand is neither a threat nor a cases belli."
+
+The minister calmed the old hussar with a gesture.
+
+"No," he replied, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth;
+"but it is embarrassing, embarrassing!  Confound Menko!  He always was a
+feather-brain!  The idea of his leaving diplomacy to seek adventures!
+He must know, however, that his case is--what shall I say?--embarrassing,
+very embarrassing. I don't suppose he had any idea of conspiring.  He is
+a malcontent, this Menko, a malcontent!  He would have made his mark in
+our embassies.  The devil take him!  Ah! my dear Count, it is very
+embarrassing, very embarrassing!"
+
+The minister uttered these words in a calm, courteous, polished manner,
+even when he said "The devil take him!"  He then went on to say, that he
+could not make Varhely an absolute promise; he would look over the papers
+in the affair, telegraph to Warsaw and St. Petersburg, make a rapid study
+of what he called again the "very embarrassing" case of Michel Menko, and
+give Varhely an answer within twenty-four hours.
+
+"That will give you a chance to take a look at our city, my dear Count.
+Vienna has changed very much.  Have you seen the opera-house?  It is
+superb.  Hans Makart is just exhibiting a new picture.  Be sure to see
+it, and visit his studio, too; it is well worth examining.  I have no
+need to tell you that I am at your service to act as your cicerone, and
+show you all the sights."
+
+"Are any of our old friends settled here?"  asked Varhely.
+
+"Yes, yes," said the minister, softly.  "But they are deputies,
+university professors, or councillors of the administration.  All
+changed!  all changed!"
+
+Then Varhely wished to know if certain among them whom he had not
+forgotten had "changed," as the minister said.
+
+"Where is Armand Bitto?"
+
+"Dead.  He died very poor."
+
+"And Arpad Ovody, Georgei's lieutenant, who was so brave at the assault
+of Buda?  I thought that he was killed with that bullet through his
+cheek."
+
+"Ovody?  He is at the head of the Magyar Bank, and is charged by the
+ministry with the conversion of the six per cent. Hungarian loan.  He is
+intimately connected with the Rothschild group.  He has I don't know how
+many thousand florins a year, and a castle in the neighborhood of
+Presburg.  A great collector of pictures, and a very amiable man!"
+
+"And Hieronymis Janos, who wrote such eloquent proclamations and calls to
+arms?  Kossuth was very fond of him."
+
+"He is busy, with Maurice Jokai, preparing a great book upon the Austro-
+Hungarian monarchy, a book patronized by the Archduke Rudolph.  He will
+doubtless edit the part relative to the kingdom of Saint Stephen."
+
+"Ha! ha!  He will have a difficult task when he comes to the recital of
+the battle at Raab against Francis Joseph in person!  He commanded at
+Raab himself, as you must remember well."
+
+"Yes, he did, I remember," said the minister.  Then, with a smile, he
+added: "Bah!  History is written, not made.  Hieronymis Janos's book will
+be very good, very good!"
+
+"I don't doubt it.  What about Ferency Szilogyi?  Is he also writing
+books under the direction of the Archduke Rudolph?"
+
+"No!  no!  Ferency Szilogyi is president of the court of assizes, and a
+very good magistrate he is."
+
+"He! an hussar?"
+
+"Oh! the world changes!  His uniform sleeps in some chest, preserved in
+camphor.  Szilogyi has only one fault: he is too strongly anti-Semitic."
+
+"He! a Liberal?"
+
+"He detests the Israelites, and he allows it to be seen a little too
+much.  He embarrasses us sometimes.  But there is one extenuating
+circumstance--he has married a Jewess!"
+
+This was said in a light, careless, humorously sceptical tone.
+
+"On the whole," concluded the minister, "Armand Bitto, who is no longer
+in this world, is perhaps the most fortunate of all."
+
+Then, turning to Yanski with his pleasant smile, and holding out his
+delicate, well-kept hand, which had once brandished the sabre, he said:
+
+"My dear Varhely, you will dine with me to-morrow, will you not?  It is a
+great pleasure to see you again!  Tomorrow I shall most probably give you
+an answer to your request--a request which I am happy, very happy, to
+take into consideration.  I wish also to present you to the Countess.
+But no allusions to the past before her!  She is a Spaniard, and she
+would not understand the old ideas very well.  Kossuth, Bem, and Georgei
+would astonish her, astonish her!  I trust to your tact, Varhely.  And
+then it is so long ago, so very long ago, all that.  Let the dead past
+bury its dead!  Is it understood?"
+
+Yanski Varhely departed, a little stunned by this interview.  He had
+never felt so old, so out of the fashion, before.  Prince Zilah and he
+now seemed to him like two ancestors of the present generation--Don
+Quixotes, romanticists, imbeciles.  The minister was, as Jacquemin would
+have said, a sly dog, who took the times as he found them, and left
+spectres in peace.  Well, perhaps he was right!
+
+"Ah, well," thought the old hussar, with an odd smile, "there is the age
+of moustaches and the age of whiskers, that is all.  Ladany has even
+found a way to become bald: he was born to be a minister!"
+
+It little mattered to him, however, this souvenir of his youth found with
+new characteristics.  If Count Josef Ladany rescued Menko from the police
+of the Czar, and, by setting him free, delivered him to him, Varhely, all
+was well.  By entering the ministry, Ladany would thus be at least useful
+for something.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+"TO SEEK FORGETFULNESS"
+
+The negotiations with Warsaw, however, detained Yanski Varhely at Vienna
+longer than he wished.  Count Josef evidently went zealously to work to
+obtain from the Russian Government Menko's release.  He had promised
+Varhely, the evening he received his old comrade at dinner, that he would
+put all the machinery at work to obtain the fulfilment of his request.
+"I only ask you, if I attain the desired result, that you will do
+something to cool off that hotheaded Menko.  A second time he would not
+escape Siberia."
+
+Varhely had made no reply; but the very idea that Michel Menko might be
+free made his head swim.  There was, in the Count's eagerness to obtain
+Menko's liberty, something of the excitement of a hunter tracking his
+prey.  He awaited Michel's departure from the fortress as if he were a
+rabbit in its burrow.
+
+"If he is set at liberty, I suppose that we shall know where he goes," he
+said to the minister.
+
+"It is more than probable that the government of the Czar will trace his
+journey for him.  You shall be informed."
+
+Count Ladany did not seek to know for what purpose Varhely demanded, with
+such evident eagerness, this release.  It was enough for him that his old
+brother-in-arms desired it, and that it was possible.
+
+"You see how everything is for the best, Varhely," he said to him one
+morning.  "Perhaps you blamed me when you learned that I had accepted a
+post from Austria.  Well, you see, if I did not serve the Emperor, I
+could not serve you!"
+
+During his sojourn at Vienna, Varhely kept himself informed, day by day,
+as to what was passing in Paris.  He did not write to Prince Zilah,
+wishing, above everything, to keep his errand concealed from him; but
+Angelo Valla, who had remained in France, wrote or telegraphed whatever
+happened to the Prince.
+
+Marsa Laszlo was cured; she had left Dr. Sims's institution, and returned
+to the villa of Maisons-Lafitte.
+
+The poor girl came out of her terrible stupor with the distaste to
+take up the thread of life which sometimes comes after a night of
+forgetfulness in sleep.  This stupor, which might have destroyed her,
+and the fever which had shaken her, seemed to her sweet and enviable
+now compared to this punishment: To live!  To live and think!
+
+And yet--yes, she wished to live to once more see Andras, whose look,
+fixed upon her, had rekindled the extinct intellectual flame of her
+being.  She wished to live, now that her reason had returned to her,
+to live to wrest from the Prince a word of pardon.  It could not be
+possible that her existence was to end with the malediction of this man.
+It seemed to her, that, if she should ever see him face to face, she
+would find words of desperate supplication which would obtain her
+absolution.
+
+Certainly--she repented it bitterly every hour, now that the punishment
+of thinking and feeling had been inflicted upon her--she had acted
+infamously, been almost as criminal as Menko, by her silence and deceit--
+her deceit!  She, who hated a lie!  But she longed to make the Prince
+understand that the motive of her conduct was the love which she had for
+him.  Yes, her love alone!  There was no other reason, no other, for her
+unpardonable treachery.  He did not think it now, without any doubt.
+He must accuse her of some base calculation or vile intrigue.  But she
+was certain that, if she could see him again, she would prove to him that
+the only cause of her conduct was her unquenchable love for him.
+
+"Let him only believe that, and then let him fly me forever, if he likes!
+Forever!  But I cannot endure to have him despise me, as he must!"
+
+It was this hope which now attached her to life.  After her return to
+Maisons-Lafitte from Vaugirard, she would have killed herself if she had
+not so desired another interview where she could lay bare her heart.
+Not daring to appear before Andras, not even thinking of such a thing as
+seeking him, she resolved to wait some opportunity, some chance, she knew
+not what.  Suddenly, she thought of Yanski Varhely.  Through Varhely, she
+might be able to say to Andras all that she wished her husband--her
+husband!  the very word made her shudder with shame--to know of the
+reason of her crime.  She wrote to the old Hungarian; but, as she
+received no response, she left Maisons-Lafitte and went to Varhely's
+house.  They did not know there, where the Count was; but Monsieur Angelo
+Valla would forward any letters to him.
+
+She then begged the Italian to send to Varhely a sort of long confession,
+in which she asked his aid to obtain from the Prince the desired
+interview.
+
+The letter reached Yanski while he was at Vienna.  He answered it with a
+few icy words; but what did that matter to Marsa?  It was not Varhely's
+rancor she cared for, but Zilah's contempt.  She implored him again, in a
+letter in which she poured out her whole soul, to return, to be there
+when she should tell the Prince all her remorse--the remorse which was
+killing her, and making of her detested beauty a spectre.
+
+There was such sincerity in this letter, wherein a conscience sobbed,
+that, little by little, in spite of his rough exterior, the soldier, more
+accessible to emotion than he cared to have it appear, was softened, and
+growled beneath his moustache
+
+"So!  So!  She suffers.  Well, that is something."
+
+He answered Marsa that he would return when he had finished a work he had
+vowed to accomplish; and, without explaining anything to the Tzigana, he
+added, at the end of his letter, these words, which, enigmatical as they
+were, gave a vague, inexplicable hope to Marsa "And pray that I may
+return soon!"
+
+The day after he had sent this letter to Maisons-Lafitte, Varhely
+received from Ladany a message to come at once to the ministry.
+
+On his arrival there, Count Josef handed him a despatch.  The Russian
+minister of foreign affairs telegraphed to his colleague at Vienna, that
+his Majesty the Czar consented to the release of Count Menko, implicated
+in the Labanoff affair.  Labanoff would probably be sent to Siberia the
+very day that Count Menko would receive a passport and an escort to the
+frontier.  Count Menko had chosen Italy for his retreat, and he would
+start for Florence the day his Excellency received this despatch.
+
+"Well, my dear minister," exclaimed Varhely, "thank you a thousand times.
+And, with my thanks, my farewell.  I am also going to Florence."
+
+"Immediately?"
+
+"Immediately."
+
+"You will arrive there before Menko."
+
+"I am in a hurry," replied Varhely, with a smile.
+
+He went to the telegraph office, after leaving the ministry, and sent a
+despatch to Angelo Valla, at Paris, in which he asked the Venetian to
+join him in Florence.  Valla had assured him that he could rely on him
+for any service; and Varhely left Vienna, certain that he should find
+Manin's old minister at Florence.
+
+"After all, he has not changed so much," he said to himself, thinking of
+Josef Ladany.  "Without his aid, Menko would certainly have escaped me.
+Ladany has taken the times as they are: Zilah and I desire to have them
+as they should be.  Which is right?"
+
+Then, while the train was carrying him to Venice, he thought: Bah! it was
+much better to be a dupe like himself and Zilah, and to die preserving,
+like an unsurrendered flag, one's dream intact.
+
+To die?
+
+Yes!  After all, Varhely might, at this moment, be close to death; but,
+whatever might be the fate which awaited him at the end of his journey,
+he found the road very long and the engine very slow.
+
+At Venice he took a train which carried him through Lombardy into
+Tuscany; and at Florence he found Angelo Valla.
+
+The Italian already knew, in regard to Michel Menko, all that it was
+necessary for him to know.  Before going to London, Menko, on his return
+from Pau, after the death of his wife, had retired to a small house he
+owned in Pistoja; and here he had undoubtedly gone now.
+
+It was a house built on the side of a hill, and surrounded with olive-
+trees.  Varhely and Valla waited at the hotel until one of Balla's
+friends, who lived at Pistoja, should inform him of the arrival of the
+Hungarian count.  And Menko did, in fact, come there three days after
+Varhely reached Florence.
+
+"To-morrow, my dear Valla," said Yanski, "you will accompany me to see
+Menko?"
+
+"With pleasure," responded the Italian.
+
+Menko's house was some distance from the station, at the very end of the
+little city.
+
+The bell at the gate opening into the garden, had been removed, as if to
+show that the master of the house did not wish to be disturbed.  Varhely
+was obliged to pound heavily upon the wooden barrier.  The servant who
+appeared in answer to his summons, was an Hungarian, and he wore the
+national cap, edged with fur.
+
+"My master does not receive visitors," he answered when Yanski asked him,
+in Italian, if Count Menko were at home.
+
+"Go and say to Menko Mihaly," said Varhely, this time in Hungarian, "that
+Count Varhely is here as the representative of Prince Zilah!"
+
+The domestic disappeared, but returned almost immediately and opened the
+gate.  Varhely and Valla crossed the garden, entered the house, and found
+themselves face to face with Menko.
+
+Varhely would scarcely have recognized him.
+
+The former graceful, elegant young man had suddenly aged: his hair was
+thin and gray upon the temples, and, instead of the carefully trained
+moustache of the embassy attache, a full beard now covered his emaciated
+cheeks.
+
+Michel regarded the entrance of Varhely into the little salon where he
+awaited him, as if he were some spectre, some vengeance which he had
+expected, and which did not astonish him.  He stood erect, cold and
+still, as Yanski advanced toward him; while Angelo Valla remained in the
+doorway, mechanically stroking his smoothly shaven chin.
+
+"Monsieur," said Varhely, "for months I have looked forward impatiently
+to this moment.  Do not doubt that I have sought you."
+
+"I did not hide myself," responded Menko.
+
+"Indeed?  Then may I ask what was your object in going to Warsaw?"
+
+"To seek-forgetfulness," said the young man, slowly and sadly.
+
+This simple word--so often spoken by Zilah--which had no more effect upon
+the stern old Hungarian than a tear upon a coat of mail, produced a
+singular impression upon Valla.  It seemed to him to express
+unconquerable remorse.
+
+"What you have done can not be forgotten," said Varhely.
+
+"No more than what I have suffered."
+
+"You made me the accomplice of the most cowardly and infamous act a man
+could commit.  I have come to you to demand an explanation."
+
+Michel lowered his eyes at these cutting words, his thin face paling, and
+his lower lip trembling; but he said nothing.  At last, after a pause, he
+raised his eyes again to the face of the old Hungarian, and, letting the
+words fall one by one, he replied:
+
+"I am at your disposal for whatever you choose to demand, to exact.
+I only desire to assure you that I had no intention of involving you in
+an act which I regarded as a cruel necessity.  I wished to avenge myself.
+But I did not wish my vengeance to arrive too late, when what I had
+assumed the right to prevent had become irreparable."
+
+"I do not understand exactly," said Varhely.
+
+Menko glanced at Valla as if to ask whether he could speak openly before
+the Italian.
+
+"Monsieur Angelo Valla was one of the witnesses of the marriage of Prince
+Andras Zilah," said Yanski.
+
+"I know Monsieur," said Michel, bowing to Valla.
+
+"Ah!"  he exclaimed abruptly, his whole manner changing.  "There was a
+man whom I respected, admired and loved.  That man, without knowing it,
+wrested from me the woman who had been the folly, the dream, and the
+sorrow of my life.  I would have done anything to prevent that woman from
+bearing the name of that man."
+
+"You sent to the Prince letters written to you by that woman, and that,
+too, after the Tzigana had become Princess Zilah."
+
+"She had let loose her dogs upon me to tear me to pieces.  I was insane
+with rage.  I wished to destroy her hopes also.  I gave those letters to
+my valet with absolute orders to deliver them to the Prince the evening
+before the wedding.  At the same hour that I left Paris, the letters
+should have been in the hands of the man who had the right to see them,
+and when there was yet time for him to refuse his name to the woman who
+had written them.  My servant did not obey, or did not understand.  Upon
+my honor, this is true.  He kept the letters twenty-four hours longer
+than I had ordered him to do; and it was not she whom I punished, but I
+struck the man for whom I would have given my life."
+
+"Granted that there was a fatality of this sort in your conduct,"
+responded Varhely, coldly, "and that your lackey did not understand your
+commands: the deed which you committed was none the less that of a
+coward.  You used as a weapon the letters of a woman, and of a woman whom
+you had deceived by promising her your name when it was no longer yours
+to give!"
+
+"Are you here to defend Mademoiselle Marsa Laszlo?"  asked Michel, a
+trifle haughtily.
+
+"I am here to defend the Princess Zilah, and to avenge Prince Andras.  I
+am here, above all, to demand satisfaction for your atrocious action in
+having taken me as the instrument of your villainy."
+
+"I regret it deeply and sincerely," replied Menko; "and I am at your
+orders."
+
+The tone of this response admitted of no reply, and Yanski and Valla took
+their departure.
+
+Valla then obtained another second from the Hungarian embassy, and two
+officers in garrison at Florence consented to serve as Menko's friends.
+It was arranged that the duel should take place in a field near Pistoja.
+
+Valla, anxious and uneasy, said to Varhely:
+
+"All this is right and proper, but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"But suppose he kills you?  The right is the right, I know; but leaden
+bullets are not necessarily on the side of the right, and--"
+
+"Well," interrupted Yanski, "in case of the worst, you must charge
+yourself, my dear Valla, with informing the Prince how his old friend
+Yanski Varhely defended his honor--and also tell him of the place where
+Count Menko may be found.  I am going to attempt to avenge Zilah.  If I
+do not succeed, 'Teremtete'!"  ripping out the Hungarian oath, "he will
+avenge me, that is all!  Let us go to supper."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+"IF MENKO WERE DEAD!"
+
+Prince Zilah, wandering solitary in the midst of crowded Paris, was
+possessed by one thought, one image impossible to drive away, one name
+which murmured eternally in his ears--Marsa; Marsa, who was constantly
+before his eyes, sometimes in the silvery shimmer of her bridal robes,
+and sometimes with the deathly pallor of the promenader in the garden of
+Vaugirard; Marsa, who had taken possession of his being, filling his
+whole heart, and, despite his revolt, gradually overpowering all other
+memories, all other passions!  Marsa, his last love, since nothing was
+before him save the years when the hair whitens, and when life weighs
+heavily upon weary humanity; and not only his last love, but his only
+love!
+
+Oh!  why had he loved her?  Or, having loved her, why had she not
+confessed to him that that coward of a Menko had deceived her!  Who
+knows?  He might have pardoned her, perhaps, and accepted the young girl,
+the widow of that passion.  Widow?  No, not while Menko lived.  Oh! if he
+were dead!
+
+And Zilah repeated, with a fierce longing for vengeance: "If he were
+dead!"  That is, if there were not between them, Zilah and Marsa, the
+abhorred memory of the lover!
+
+Well!  if Menko were dead?
+
+When he feverishly asked himself this question, Zilah recalled at the
+same time Marsa, crouching at his feet, and giving no other excuse than
+this: "I loved you!  I wished to belong to you, to be your wife!"
+
+His wife!  Yes, the beautiful Tzigana he had met at Baroness Dinati's was
+now his wife!  He could punish or pardon.  But he had punished, since he
+had inflicted upon her that living death--insanity.  And he asked himself
+whether he should not pardon Princess Zilah, punished, repentant, almost
+dying.
+
+He knew that she was now at Maisons, cured of her insanity, but still ill
+and feeble, and that she lived there like a nun, doing good, dispensing
+charity, and praying--praying for him, perhaps.
+
+For him or for Menko?
+
+No, for him!  She was not vile enough to have lied, when she asked,
+implored, besought death from Zilah who held her life or death in his
+hands.
+
+"Yes, I had the right to kill her, but--I have the right to pardon also,"
+thought Zilah.
+
+Ah, if Menko were dead!
+
+The Prince gradually wrought himself into a highly nervous condition,
+missing Varhely, uneasy at his prolonged absence, and never succeeding in
+driving away Marsa's haunting image.  He grew to hate his solitary home
+and his books.
+
+"I shall not want any breakfast," he said one morning to his valet; and,
+going out, he descended the Champs-Elysees on foot.
+
+At the corner of the Place de la Madeleine, he entered a restaurant, and
+sat down near a window, gazing mechanically at this lively corner of
+Paris, at the gray facade of the church, the dusty trees, the asphalt,
+the promenaders, the yellow omnibuses, the activity of Parisian life.
+
+All at once he was startled to hear his name pronounced and to see before
+him, with his hand outstretched, as if he were asking alms, old General
+Vogotzine, who said to him, timidly:
+
+"Ah, my dear Prince, how glad I am to see you!  I was breakfasting over
+there, and my accursed paper must have hidden me.  Ouf!  If you only
+knew!  I am stifling!"
+
+"Why, what is the matter?"  asked Andras.
+
+"Matter?  Look at me!  I must be as red as a beet!"
+
+Poor Vogotzine had entered the restaurant for breakfast, regretting the
+cool garden of Maisons-Lafitte, which, now that Marsa no longer sat
+there, he had entirely to himself.  After eating his usual copious
+breakfast, he had imprudently asked the waiter for a Russian paper; and,
+as he read, and sipped his kummel, which he found a little insipid and
+almost made him regret the vodka of his native land, his eyes fell upon a
+letter from Odessa, in which there was a detailed description of the
+execution of three nihilists, two of them gentlemen.  It told how they
+were dragged, tied to the tails of horses, to the open square, each of
+them bearing upon his breast a white placard with this inscription, in
+black letters: "Guilty of high treason."  Then the wretched General
+shivered from head to foot.  Every detail of the melodramatic execution
+seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron.  He fancied he could
+see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each
+gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray
+pall.  He saw, in the hollow square formed by a battalion of Cossack
+infantry, the executioner, Froloff, in his red shirt and his plush
+trousers tucked into his boots, and, beside him, a pale, black-robed
+priest.
+
+"Who the devil is such an idiot as to relate such things in the
+newspapers?"  he growled.
+
+And in terror he imagined he could hear the sheriff read the sentence,
+see the priest present the cross to the condemned men, and Froloff,
+before putting on the black caps, degrade the gentlemen by breaking their
+swords over their heads.
+
+Then, half suffocated, Vogotzine flung the paper on the floor; and, with
+eyes distended with horror, drawing the caraffe of kummel toward him, he
+half emptied it, drinking glass after glass to recover his self-control.
+It seemed to him that Froloff was there behind him, and that the branches
+of the candelabra, stretching over his heated head, were the arms of
+gibbets ready to seize him.  To reassure himself, and be certain that he
+was miles and miles from Russia, he was obliged to make sure of the
+presence of the waiters and guests in the gay and gilded restaurant.
+
+"The devil take the newspapers!"  he muttered.
+
+"They are cursed stupid!  I will never read another!  All that stuff is
+absurd!  Absurd!  A fine aid to digestion, truly!"
+
+And, paying his bill, he rose to go, passing his hand over his head as if
+his sword had been broken upon it and left a contusion, and glancing
+timidly into the mirrors, as if he feared to discover the image of
+Froloff there.
+
+It was at this moment that he discovered Prince Zilah, and rushed up to
+him with the joyful cry of a child discovering a protector.
+
+The Prince noticed that poor Vogotzine, who sat heavily down by his side,
+was not entirely sober.  The enormous quantity of kummel he had absorbed,
+together with the terror produced by the article he had read, had proved
+too much for the good man: his face was fiery, and he constantly
+moistened his dry lips.
+
+"I suppose it astonishes you to see me here?"  he said, as if he had
+forgotten all that had taken place.  "I--I am astonished to see myself
+here!  But I am so bored down there at Maisons, and I rust, rust, as
+little--little--ah!  Stephanie said to me once at Odessa.  So I came to
+breathe the air of Paris.  A miserable idea!  Oh, if you knew!  When I
+think that that might happen to me!"
+
+"What?" asked Andras, mechanically.
+
+"What?" gasped the General, staring at him with dilated eyes.  "Why,
+Froloff, of course!  Froloff!  The sword broken over your head!  The
+gallows!  Ach!  I am not a nihilist--heaven forbid!--but I have
+displeased the Czar.  And to displease the Czar--Brr!  Imagine the open
+square-Odessa-No, no, don't let us talk of it any more!" glancing
+suddenly about him, as if he feared the platoon of Cossacks were there,
+in the restaurant, come to drag him away in the name of the Emperor.
+"Oh!  by the way, Prince," he exclaimed abruptly.  "why don't you ever
+come to Maisons-Lafitte?"
+
+He must, indeed, have been drunk to address such a question to the
+Prince.
+
+Zilah looked him full in the face; but Vogotzine's eyes blinked stupidly,
+and his head fell partially forward on his breast.  Satisfied that he was
+not responsible for what he was saying, Andras rose to leave the
+restaurant, and the General with difficulty stumbled to his feet, and
+instinctively grasped Andras's arm, the latter making no resistance, the
+mention of Maisons-Lafitte interesting him, even from the lips of this
+intoxicated old idiot.
+
+"Do you know," stuttered Vogotzine, "I, myself, should be glad--very
+glad--if you would come there.  I am bored-bored to death!  Closed
+shutters--not the least noise.  The creaking of a door--the slightest bit
+of light-makes her ill.  The days drag--they drag--yes, they do.  No one
+speaks.  Most of the time I dine alone.  Shall I tell you?--no--yes, I
+will.  Marsa, yes, well!  Marsa, she is good, very good--thinks only of
+the poor-the poor, you know!  But whatever Doctor Fargeas may say about
+it, she is mad!  You can't deceive me!  She is insane!--still insane!"
+
+"Insane?"  said Andras, striving to control his emotion.
+
+The General, who was now staggering violently, clung desperately to the
+Prince.  They had reached the boulevard, and Andras, hailing a cab, made
+Vogotzine get in, and instructed the coachman to drive to the Bois.
+
+"I assure you that she is insane," proceeded the General, throwing his
+head back on the cushions.  "Yes, insane.  She does not eat anything; she
+never rests.  Upon my word, I don't know how she lives.  Once--her dogs--
+she took walks.  Now, I go with them into the park--good beasts--very
+gentle.  Sometimes, all that she says, is: 'Listen!  Isn't that Duna or
+Bundas barking?'  Ah! if I wasn't afraid of Froloffyes, Froloff--how soon
+I should return to Russia!  The life of Paris--the life of Paris wearies
+me.  You see, I come here today, I take up a newspaper, and I see what?
+Froloff!  Besides, the life of Paris--at Maisons-Lafitte--between four
+walls, it is absurd!  Now, acknowledge, old man, isn't it absurd?  Do you
+know what I should like to do?  I should like to send a petition to the
+Czar.  What did I do, after all, I should like to know?  It wasn't
+anything so horrible.  I stayed, against the Emperor's orders, five days
+too long at Odessa--that was all--yes, you see, a little French actress
+who was there, who sang operettas; oh, how she did sing operettas!
+Offenbach, you know;" and the General tried to hum a bar or two of the
+'Dites lui', with ludicrous effect.  "Charming!  To leave her, ah!  I
+found that very hard.  I remained five days: that wasn't much, eh, Zilah?
+five days?  But the devil!  There was a Grand Duke--well--humph! younger
+than I, of course--and--and--the Grand Duke was jealous.  Oh!  there was
+at that time a conspiracy at Odessa!  I was accused of spending my time
+at the theatre, instead of watching the conspirators.  They even said I
+was in the conspiracy!  Oh, Lord!  Odessa!  The gallows!  Froloff!  Well,
+it was Stephanie Gavaud who was the cause of it.  Don't tell that to
+Marsa!  Ah!  that little Stephanie!  'J'ai vu le vieux Bacchus sur sa
+roche fertile!'  Tautin--no, Tautin couldn't sing like that little
+Stephanie!  Well," continued Vogotzine, hiccoughing violently, "because
+all that happened then, I now lead here the life of an oyster!  Yes, the
+life of an oyster, of a turtle, of a clam!  alone with a woman sad as
+Mid-Lent, who doesn't speak, doesn't sing, does nothing but weep, weep,
+weep!  It is crushing!  I say just what I think!  Crushing, then,
+whatever my niece may be--cr-r-rushing!  And--ah--really, my dear fellow,
+I should be glad if you would come.  Why did you go away?  Yes, yes, that
+is your affair, and I don't ask any questions.  Only--only you would do
+well to come--"
+
+"Why?"  interrupted Andras, turning quickly to Vogotzine.
+
+"Ah!  why?  Because!"  said the General, trying to give to his heavy face
+an expression of shrewd, dignified gravity.
+
+"What has happened?"  asked the Prince.  "Is she suffering again?  Ill?"
+
+"Oh, insane, I tell you!  absolutely insane!  mad as a March hare!
+Two days ago, you see--"
+
+"Well, what?  two days ago?"
+
+"Because, two days ago!--"
+
+"Well, what?  What is it?  Speak, Vogotzine!"
+
+"The despatch," stammered the General.
+
+"What despatch?"
+
+"The des--despatch from Florence."
+
+"She has received a despatch from Florence?"
+
+"A telegram--blue paper--she read it before me; upon my word, I thought
+it was from you!  She said--no; those miserable bits of paper, it is
+astonishing how they alarm you.  There are telegrams which have given me
+a fit of indigestion, I assure you--and I haven't the heart of a
+chicken!"
+
+"Go on!  Marsa?  This despatch?  Whom was it from?  What did Marsa say?"
+
+"She turned white as a sheet; she began to tremble--an attack of the
+nerves--and she said: 'Well, in two days I shall know, at last, whether I
+am to live!'  Queer, wasn't it?  I don't know what she meant!  But it is
+certain--yes, certain, my dear fellow--that she expects, this evening,
+some one who is coming--or who is not coming, from Florence--that
+depends."
+
+"Who is it?  Who?"  cried Andras.  "Michel Menko?"
+
+"I don't know," faltered Vogotzine in alarm, wondering whether it were
+Froloff's hand that had seized him by the collar of his coat.
+
+"It is Menko, is it not?"  demanded Andras; while the terrified General
+gasped out something unintelligible, his intoxication increasing every
+yard the carriage advanced in the Bois.
+
+Andras was almost beside himself with pain and suspense.  What did it
+mean?  Who had sent that despatch?  Why had it caused Marsa such emotion?
+"In two days I shall know, at last, whether I am to live!"  Who could
+make her utter such a cry?  Who, if not Michel Menko, was so intimately
+connected with her life as to trouble her so, to drive her insane, as
+Vogotzine said?
+
+"It is Menko, is it not?  it is Menko?"  repeated Andras again.
+
+And Vogotzine gasped:
+
+"Perhaps!  anything is possible!"
+
+But he stopped suddenly, as if he comprehended, despite his inebriety,
+that he was in danger of going too far and doing some harm.
+
+"Come, Vogotzine, come, you have told me too much not to tell me all!"
+
+"That is true; yes, I have said too much!  Ah!  The devil!  this is not
+my affair!--Well, yes, Count Menko is in Florence or near Florence--
+I don't know where.  Marsa told me that--without meaning to.  She was
+excited--very excited--talked to herself.  I did not ask her anything--
+but--she is insane, you see, mad, mad!  She first wrote a despatch to
+Italy--then she tore it up like this, saying: 'No, what is to happen,
+will happen!' There!  I don't know anything but that.  I don't know
+anything!"
+
+"Ah!  she is expecting him!"  cried Andras.  "When?"
+
+"I don't know!"
+
+"You told me it was to be this evening.  This evening, is it not?"
+
+The old General felt as ill at ease as if he had been before a military
+commission or in the hands of Froloff.
+
+"Yes, this evening."
+
+"At Maisons-Lafitte?"
+
+"At Maisons," responded Vogotzine, mechanically.  "And all this wearies
+me--wearies me.  Was it for this I decided to come to Paris?  A fine
+idea!  At least, there are no Russian days at Maisons!"
+
+Andras made no reply.
+
+He stopped the carriage, got out, and, saluting the General with a brief
+"Thank you!"  walked rapidly away, leaving Vogotzine in blank amazement,
+murmuring, as he made an effort to sit up straight:
+
+"Well, well, are you going to leave me here, old man?  All alone?  This
+isn't right!"
+
+And, like a forsaken child, the old General, with comic twitchings of his
+eyebrows and nostrils, felt a strong desire to weep.
+
+"Where shall I drive you, Monsieur?"  asked the coachman.
+
+"Wherever you like, my friend," responded Vogotzine, modestly, with an
+appealing look at the man.  "You, at least, must not leave me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+THE VALE OF VIOLETS
+
+In the Prince's mind the whole affair seemed clear as day, and he
+explained the vague anxiety with which he had been afflicted for several
+days as a mysterious premonition of a new sorrow.  Menko was at Florence!
+Menko, for it could be no other than he, had telegraphed to Marsa,
+arranging a meeting with her.  That very evening he was to be in the
+house of Marsa Laszlo--Marsa who bore, in spite of all, the title and
+name of the Zilahs.  Was it possible?  After the marriage, after this
+woman's vows and tears, these two beings, separated for a time, were to
+be united again.  And he, Andras, had almost felt pity for her!  He had
+listened to Varhely, an honest man; drawing a parallel between a
+vanquished soldier and this fallen girl--Varhely, the rough, implacable
+Varhely, who had also been the dupe of the Tzigana, and one evening at
+Sainte-Adresse had even counselled the deceived husband to pardon her.
+
+In a state bordering on frenzy, Zilah returned to his hotel, thinking:
+
+"He will be with her this evening!"
+
+This was worse than all the rest.  How could he punish her?
+
+Punish her?
+
+Why not?  Was not Marsa Laszlo his wife?  That villa of Maisons-Lafitte,
+where she thought herself so safe, was his by law.  He, the husband, had
+a right to enter there at any hour and demand of his wife an account of
+his honor.
+
+"She wished this name of Zilah!  Well!  she shall know at least what it
+costs and what it imposes upon her!" he hissed through his clenched
+teeth.  He walked nervously to and fro in the library of his hotel, his
+excitement increasing at every step.
+
+"She is Princess Zilah!  She--a princess!  Nothing can wrest from her
+that title which she has stolen!  Princess be it, then; but the Prince
+has the right to deal out life or death to his wife--to his wife and to
+the lover of his wife!"  with a spasmodic burst of laughter.  "Her lover
+is to be there; Menko is to be there, and I complain!  The man whom I
+have sought in vain will be before me.  I shall hold him at my mercy,
+and I do not thank the kind fate which gives me that joy!  This evening!
+He will be at her house this evening!  Good!  Justice shall be done!"
+
+Every moment added to his fever.  He would have given ten years of his
+life if it were already evening.  He waited impatiently for the hour to
+come when he could go and surprise them.  He even thought of meeting
+Menko at the railway station on his arrival from Italy: but what would be
+the use?  Menko would be at Maisons; and he would kill him before her
+face, in a duel if Menko would fight, or like a thief caught in the act
+if he attempted to fly.  That would be better.  Yes, he would kill him
+like a dog, if the other--but no!  The Hungarian, struck in the presence
+of the Tzigana, would certainly not recoil before a pistol.  Marsa should
+be the sole witness of the duel, and the blood of the Prince or of Menko
+should spatter her face--a crimson stain upon her pale cheek should be
+her punishment.
+
+Early in the evening Andras left the hotel, after slipping into the
+pocket of his overcoat a pair of loaded pistols: one of them he would
+cast at Menko's feet.  It was not assassination he wished, but justice.
+
+He took the train to Maisons, and, on his arrival there, crossed the
+railway bridge, and found himself almost alone in the broad avenue which
+runs through the park.  As he walked on through the rapidly darkening
+shadows, he began to feel a strange sensation, as if nothing had
+happened, and as if he were shaking off, little by little, a hideous
+nightmare.  In a sort of voluntary hallucination, he imagined that he was
+going, as in former days, to Marsa's house; and that she was awaiting him
+in one of those white frocks which became her so well, with her silver
+belt clasped with the agraffe of opals.  As he advanced, a host of
+memories overwhelmed him.  He had walked with Marsa under these great
+lindens forming an arch overhead like that of a cathedral.  He remembered
+conversations they had had in the evening, when a slight mist silvered
+the majestic park, and the white villa loomed vaguely before them like
+some phantom palace of fairyland.  With the Tzigana clinging to his arm,
+he had seen those fountains, with their singing waters, that broad lawn
+between the two long lines of trees, those winding paths through the
+shrubbery; and, in the emotion aroused by these well-remembered places,
+there was a sensation of bitter pain at the thought of the happiness that
+might have been his had fate fulfilled her promises, which increased,
+rather than appeased, the Prince's anger.
+
+As his steps led him mechanically nearer and nearer to the house where
+she lived, all the details of his wedding-day rose in his memory, and he
+turned aside to see again the little church, the threshold of which they
+had crossed together--she exquisitely lovely in her white draperies, and
+he overflowing with happiness.
+
+The square in front of the sanctuary was now deserted and the leaves were
+beginning to fall from the trees.  A man was lying asleep upon the steps
+before the bolted door.  Zilah stood gazing at the Gothic portal, with a
+statue of the Virgin Mother above it, and wondered whether it were he who
+had once led there a lovely girl, about to become his wife; and the sad,
+closed church produced upon him the effect of a tomb.
+
+He dragged himself away from the contemplation of the stone threshold,
+where slept the tired man--drunk perhaps, at all events happier than the
+Prince--and proceeded on his way through the woods to the abode of Marsa
+Laszlo.
+
+There was, Zilah remembered well, quite near there, a sort of narrow
+valley (where the Mayor of Maisons was said to have royally entertained
+Louis XIV and his courtiers, as they were returning from Marly), a lovely
+spot, surrounded by grassy slopes covered with violets, a little shady,
+Virgilian wood, where he and Marsa had dreamed away many happy hours.
+They had christened it The Vale o f Violets.  How many memories were in
+that sweet name, each one of which stabbed and exasperated Zilah, rising
+before him like so many spectres.
+
+He hastened his steps, repeating:
+
+"He is there!  She is waiting for him!  Her lover is there!"
+
+At the end of the road, before the villa, closed and silent like the old
+church, he stopped.  He had reached his destination; but what was he
+about to do, he who--who up to this time had protected his name from the
+poisonous breath of scandal?
+
+He was about to kill Menko, or to be killed himself.  A duel!  But what
+was the need of proposing a duel, when, exercising his rights as a
+husband, he could punish both the man and the woman?
+
+He did not hesitate long, however, but advanced to the gate, saying,
+aloud:
+
+"I have a right to enter my own house."
+
+The ringing of the bell was answered by the barking of Duna, Bundas, and
+Ortog, who tore furiously at their iron chains.
+
+A man presently appeared on the other side of the gate.  It was a
+domestic whom Andras did not know and had never seen.
+
+"Whom do you wish to see?"  asked the man.
+
+"The Princess Zilah!"
+
+"Who are you?"  demanded the man, his hand upon the inner bolt of the
+gate.
+
+"Prince Zilah!"
+
+The other stood stock-still in amazement, trying to see, through the
+darkness, the Prince's face.
+
+"Do you hear me?"  demanded Andras.
+
+And, as the domestic opened the gate, as if to observe the appearance of
+the visitor, the Prince gave it a nervous push, which threw the servant
+backward; and, once within the garden, he came close to him, and said:
+
+"Look well at me, in order that you may recognize me again.  I am master
+here."
+
+Zilah's clear eye and imperious manner awed the man, and he bowed humbly,
+not daring to speak.
+
+Andras turned on his heel, mounted the steps, and entered the house; then
+he stopped and listened.
+
+She was with him.  Yes, a man was there, and the man was speaking,
+speaking to Marsa, speaking doubtless of love.
+
+Menko, with his twisted moustache, his pretty smile and his delicate
+profile, was there, behind that door.  A red streak of light from the
+salon where Marsa was showed beneath the door, which the Prince longed to
+burst open with his foot.  With anger and bitterness filling his heart,
+he felt capable of entering there, and striking savagely, madly, at his
+rival.
+
+How these two beings had played with him; the woman who had lied to him,
+and the coward who had sent him those letters.
+
+Suddenly Marsa's voice fell upon his ear, that rich, contralto voice he
+knew so well, speaking in accents of love or joy.
+
+What was he waiting for?  His hot, feverish hand sought the handle of his
+pistol, and, striding forward, he threw open the door of the room.
+
+The light from an opal-tinted lamp fell full upon his face.  He stood
+erect upon the threshold, while two other faces were turned toward him,
+two pale faces, Marsa's and another's.
+
+Andras paused in amazement.
+
+He had sought Menko; he found--Varhely!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+THE DUEL
+
+"Yanski!"
+
+Marsa recoiled in fear at hearing this cry and the sudden appearance of
+the Prince; and, trembling like a leaf, with her face still turned toward
+that threshold where Andras stood, she murmured, in a voice choked with
+emotion:
+
+"Who is there?  Who is it?"
+
+Yanski Varhely, unable to believe his eyes, advanced, as if to make sure.
+
+"Zilah!"  he exclaimed, in his turn.
+
+He could not understand; and Zilah himself wondered whether he were not
+the victim of some illusion, and where Menko could be, that Menko whom
+Marsa had expected, and whom he, the husband, had come to chastise.
+
+But the most bewildered, in her mute amazement, was Marsa, her lips
+trembling, her face ashen, her eyes fixed upon the Prince, as she leaned
+against the marble of the mantelpiece to prevent herself from falling,
+but longing to throw herself on her knees before this man who had
+suddenly appeared, and who was master of her destiny.
+
+"You here?"  said Varhely at last.  "You followed me, then?"
+
+"No," said Andras.  "The one whom I expected to find here was not you."
+
+"Who was it, then?"
+
+"Michel Menko!"
+
+Yanski Varhely turned toward Marsa.
+
+She did not stir; she was looking at the Prince.
+
+"Michel Menko is dead," responded Varhely, shortly.  "It was to announce
+that to the Princess Zilah that I am here."
+
+Andras gazed alternately upon the old Hungarian, and upon Marsa, who
+stood there petrified, her whole soul burning in her eyes.
+
+"Dead?"  repeated Zilah, coldly.
+
+"I fought and killed him," returned Varhely.
+
+Andras struggled against the emotion which seized hold of him.  Pale as
+death, he turned from Varhely to the Tzigana, with an instinctive desire
+to know what her feelings might be.
+
+The news of this death, repeated thus before the man whom she regarded as
+the master of her existence, had, apparently, made no impression upon
+her, her thoughts being no longer there, but her whole heart being
+concentrated upon the being who had despised her, hated her, fled from
+her, and who appeared there before her as in one of her painful dreams in
+which he returned again to that very house where he had cursed her.
+
+"There was," continued Varhely, slowly, "a martyr who could not raise her
+head, who could not live, so long as that man breathed.  First of all,
+I came to her to tell her that she was delivered from a detested past.
+Tomorrow I should have informed a man whose honor is my own, that the one
+who injured and insulted him has paid his debt."
+
+With lips white as his moustache, Varhely spoke these words like a judge
+delivering a solemn sentence.
+
+A strange expression passed over Zilah's face.  He felt as if some
+horrible weight had been lifted from his heart.
+
+Menko dead!
+
+Yet there was a time when he had loved this Michel Menko: and, of the
+three beings present in the little salon, the man who had been injured by
+him was perhaps the one who gave a pitying thought to the dead, the old
+soldier remaining as impassive as an executioner, and the Tzigana
+remembering only the hatred she had felt for the one who had been her
+ruin.
+
+Menko dead!
+
+Varhely took from the mantelpiece the despatch he had sent from Florence,
+three days before, to the Princess Zilah, the one of which Vogotzine had
+spoken to Andras.
+
+He handed it to the Prince, and Andras read as follows:
+
+"I am about to risk my life for you.  Tuesday evening either I shall be
+at Maisons-Lafitte, or I shall be dead.  I fight tomorrow with Count M.
+If you do not see me again, pray for the soul of Varhely."
+
+Count Varhely had sent this despatch before going to keep his appointment
+with Michel Menko.
+
+                         ...................
+
+It had been arranged that they were to fight in a field near Pistoja.
+
+Some peasant women, who were braiding straw hats, laughed as they saw the
+men pass by.
+
+One of them called out, gayly:
+
+"Do you wish to find your sweethearts, signori?  That isn't the way!"
+
+A little farther, Varhely and his adversary encountered a monk with a
+cowl drawn over his head so that only his eyes could be seen, who,
+holding out a zinc money-box, demanded 'elemosina', alms for the sick in
+hospitals.
+
+Menko opened his pocketbook, and dropped in the box a dozen pieces of
+gold.
+
+"Mille grazie, signor!"
+
+"It is of no consequence."
+
+They arrived on the ground, and the seconds loaded the pistols.
+
+Michel asked permission of Yanski to say two words to him.
+
+"Speak!"  said Varhely.
+
+The old Hungarian stood at his post with folded arms and lowered eyes,
+while Michel approached him, and said:
+
+"Count Varhely, I repeat to you that I wished to prevent this marriage,
+but not to insult the Prince.  I give you my word of honor that this is
+true.  If you survive me, will you promise to repeat this to him?"
+
+"I promise."
+
+"I thank you."
+
+They took their positions.
+
+Angelo Valla was to give the signal to fire.
+
+He stood holding a white handkerchief in his outstretched hand, and with
+his eyes fixed upon the two adversaries, who were placed opposite each
+other, with their coats buttoned up to the chin, and their pistols held
+rigidly by their side.
+
+Varhely was as motionless as if made of granite.  Menko smiled.
+
+"One!  Two!"  counted Valla.
+
+He paused as if to take breath: then--
+
+"Three!"  he exclaimed, in the tone of a man pronouncing a death-
+sentence; and the handkerchief fell.
+
+There were two reports in quick succession.
+
+Varhely stood erect in his position; Menko's ball had cut a branch above
+his head, and the green leaves fell fluttering to the ground.
+
+Michel staggered back, his hand pressed to his left side.
+
+His seconds hastened toward him, seized him under the arms, and tried to
+raise him.
+
+"It is useless," he said.  "It was well aimed!"
+
+And, turning to Varhely, he cried, in a voice which he strove to render
+firm:
+
+"Remember your promise!"
+
+They opened his coat.  The ball had entered his breast just above the
+heart.
+
+They seated him upon the grass, with his back against a tree.
+
+He remained there, with fixed eyes, gazing, perhaps, into the infinite,
+which was now close at hand.
+
+His lips murmured inarticulate names, confused words: "Pardon--
+punishment--Marsa--"
+
+As Yanski Varhely, with his two seconds, again passed the straw-workers,
+the girls saluted them with:
+
+"Well, where are your other friends?  Have they found their sweethearts?"
+
+And while their laughter rang out upon the air, the gay, foolish laughter
+of youth and health, over yonder they were bearing away the dead body of
+Michel Menko.
+
+                         ....................
+
+Andras Zilah, with a supreme effort at self-control, listened to his old
+friend relate this tale; and, while Varhely spoke, he was thinking:
+
+It was not a lover, it was not Menko, whom Marsa expected.  Between the
+Tzigana and himself there was now nothing, nothing but a phantom.  The
+other had paid his debt with his life.  The Prince's anger disappeared as
+suddenly in proportion as his exasperation had been violent.
+
+He contemplated Marsa, thin and pale, but beautiful still.  The very
+fixedness of her great eyes gave her a strange and powerful attraction;
+and, in the manner in which Andras regarded her, Count Varhely, with his
+rough insight, saw that there were pity, astonishment, and almost fear.
+
+He pulled his moustache a moment in reflection, and then made a step
+toward the door.
+
+Marsa saw that he was about to leave the room; and, moving away from the
+marble against which she had been leaning, with a smile radiant with the
+joy of a recovered pride, she held out her hand to Yanski, and, in a
+voice in which there was an accent of almost terrible gratitude for the
+act of justice which had been accomplished, she said, firmly:
+
+"I thank you, Varhely!"
+
+Varhely made no reply, but passed out of the room, closing the door
+behind him.
+
+The husband and wife, after months of torture, anguish, and despair, were
+alone, face to face with each other.
+
+Andras's first movement was one of flight.  He was afraid of himself.
+Of his own anger?  Perhaps.  Perhaps of his own pity.
+
+He did not look at Marsa, and in two steps he was at the door.
+
+Then, with a start, as one drowning catches at a straw, as one condemned
+to death makes a last appeal for mercy, with a feeble, despairing cry
+like that of a child, a strange contrast to the almost savage thanks
+given to Varhely, she exclaimed:
+
+"Ah!  I implore you, listen to me!"
+
+Andras stopped.
+
+"What have you to say to me?" he asked.
+
+"Nothing--nothing but this: Forgive!  ah, forgive!  I have seen you once
+more; forgive me, and let me disappear; but, at least, carrying away with
+me a word from you which is not a condemnation."
+
+"I might forgive," said Andras; "but I could not forget."
+
+"I do not ask you to forget, I do not ask you that!  Does one ever
+forget?  And yet--yes, one does forget, one does forget, I know it.  You
+are the only thing in all my existence, I know only you, I think only of
+you.  I have loved only you!"
+
+Andras shivered, no longer able to fly, moved to the depths of his being
+by the tones of this adored voice, so long unheard.
+
+"There was no need of bloodshed to destroy that odious past," continued
+Marsa.  "Ah! I have atoned for it!  There is no one on earth who has
+suffered as I have.  I, who came across your path only to ruin your life!
+Your life, my God, yours!"
+
+She looked at him with worshipping eyes, as believers regard their god.
+
+"You have not suffered so much as the one you stabbed, Marsa.  He had
+never had but one love in the world, and that love was you.  If you had
+told him of your sufferings, and confessed your secret, he would have
+been capable of pardoning you.  You deceived him.  There was something
+worse than the crime itself--the lie."
+
+"Ah!" she cried, "if you knew how I hated that lie!  Would to heaven
+that some one would tear out my tongue for having deceived you!"
+
+There was an accent of truth in this wild outburst of the Tzigana; and
+upon the lips of this daughter of the puszta, Hungarian and Russian at
+once, the cry seemed the very symbol of her exceptional nature.
+
+"What is it you wish that I should do?"  she said.  "Die?  yes, I would
+willingly, gladly die for you, interposing my breast between you and a
+bullet.  Ah! I swear to you, I should be thankful to die like one of
+those who bore your name.  But, there is no fighting now, and I can not
+shed my blood for you.  I will sacrifice my life in another manner,
+obscurely, in the shadows of a cloister.  I shall have had neither lover
+nor husband, I shall be nothing, a recluse, a prisoner.  It will be well!
+yes, for me, the prison, the cell, death in a life slowly dragged out!
+Ah! I deserve that punishment, and I wish my sentence to come from you;
+I wish you to tell me that I am free to disappear, and that you order me
+to do so--but, at the same time, tell me, oh, tell me, that you have
+forgiven me!"
+
+"I!" said Andras.
+
+In Marsa's eyes was a sort of wild excitement, a longing for sacrifice, a
+thirst for martyrdom.
+
+"Do I understand that you wish to enter a convent?"  asked Andras,
+slowly.
+
+"Yes, the strictest and gloomiest.  And into that tomb I shall carry,
+with your condemnation and farewell, the bitter regret of my love, the
+weight of my remorse!"
+
+The convent!  The thought of such a fate for the woman he loved filled
+Andras Zilah with horror.  He imagined the terrible scene of Marsa's
+separation from the world; he could hear the voice of the officiating
+bishop casting the cruel words upon the living, like earth upon the dead;
+he could almost see the gleam of the scissors as they cut through her
+beautiful dark hair.
+
+Kneeling before him, her eyes wet with tears, Marsa was as lovely in her
+sorrow as a Mater Dolorosa.  All his love surged up in his heart, and a
+wild temptation assailed him to keep her beauty, and dispute with the
+convent this penitent absolved by remorse.
+
+She knelt there repentant, weeping, wringing her hands, asking nothing
+but pardon--a word, a single word of pity--and the permission to bury
+herself forever from the world.
+
+"So," he said, abruptly, "the convent cell, the prison, does not terrify
+you?"
+
+"Nothing terrifies me except your contempt."
+
+"You would live far from Paris, far from the world, far from everything?"
+
+"In a kennel of dogs, under the lash of a slavedriver; breaking stones,
+begging my bread, if you said to me: 'Do that, it is atonement!'"
+
+"Well!"  cried Andras, passionately, his lips trembling, his blood
+surging through his veins.  "Live buried in our Hungary, forgetting,
+forgotten, hidden, unknown, away from all, away from Paris, away from
+the noise of the world, in a life with me, which will be a new life!
+Will you?"
+
+She looked at him with staring, terrified eyes, believing his words to be
+some cruel jest.
+
+"Will you?"  he said again, raising her from the floor, and straining her
+to his breast, his burning lips seeking the icy ones of the Tzigana.
+"Answer me, Marsa.  Will you?"
+
+Like a sigh, the word fell on the air: "Yes."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+A NEW LIFE
+
+The following day, with tender ardor, he took her away to his old
+Hungarian castle, with its red towers still bearing marks of the ravages
+of the cannon--the castle which he never had beheld since Austria had
+confiscated it, and then, after long years, restored it to its rightful
+owner.  He fled from Paris, seeking a pure existence, and returned to his
+Hungary, to the country of his youth, the land of the vast plains.  He
+saw again the Danube and the golden Tisza.  In the Magyar costume, his
+heart beating more proudly under the national attila, he passed before
+the eyes of the peasants who had known him when a child, and had fought
+under his orders; and he spoke to them by name, recognizing many of his
+old companions in these poor people with cheeks tanned by the sun, and
+heads whitened by age.
+
+He led Marsa, trembling and happy, to the door of the castle, where they
+offered him the wine of honor, drank from the 'tschouttora',
+the Hungarian drinking-vessel, the 'notis' and cakes made of maize
+cooked in cream.
+
+Upon the lawns about the castle, the 'tschiko' shepherds, who had come on
+horseback to greet the Prince, drank plum brandy, and drank with their
+red wine the 'kadostas' and the bacon of Temesvar.  They had come from
+their farms, from their distant pusztas, peasant horsemen, like soldiers,
+with their national caps; and they joyously celebrated the return of
+Zilah Andras, the son of those Zilahs whose glorious history they all
+knew.  The dances began, the bright copper heels clinked together, the
+blue jackets, embroidered with yellow, red, or gold, swung in the wind,
+and it seemed that the land of Hungary blossomed with flowers and rang
+with songs to do honor to the coming of Prince Andras and his Princess.
+
+Then Andras entered with Marsa the abode of his ancestors.  And, in the
+great halls hung with tapestry and filled with pictures which the
+conquerors had respected, before those portraits of magnates superb in
+their robes of red or green velvet edged with fur, curved sabres by their
+sides and aigrettes upon their heads, all reproducing a common trait of
+rough frankness, with their long moustaches, their armor and their hussar
+uniforms--Marsa Laszlo, who knew them well, these heroes of her country,
+these Zilah princes who had fallen upon the field of battle, said to the
+last of them all, to Andras Zilah, before Ferency Zilah, before Sandor,
+before the Princesses Zilah who had long slept in "dull, cold marble,"
+and who had been no prouder than she of the great name they bore:
+
+"Do you know the reason why, equal to these in devotion and courage, you
+are superior to them all! It is because you are good, as good as they
+were brave.
+
+To their virtues, you, who forgive, add this virtue, which is your own:
+pity!"
+
+She looked at him humbly, raising to his face her beautiful dark eyes, as
+if to let him read her heart, in which was only his image and his name.
+She pressed closely to his side, with an uneasy, timid tenderness, as if
+she were a stranger in the presence of his great ancestors, who seemed to
+demand whether the newcomer were one of the family; and he, putting his
+arm about her, and pressing to his beating heart the Tzigana, whose eyes
+were dim with tears, said: "No, I am not better than these.  It is not
+pity which is my virtue, Marsa: it is my love.  For--I love you!"
+
+Yes, he loved her, and with all the strength of a first and only love.
+He loved her so that he forgot everything, so that he did not see that in
+Marsa's smile there was a look of the other side of the great, eternal
+river.  He loved her so that he thought only of this woman, of her
+beauty, of the delight of her caresses, of his dream of love realized in
+the air of the adored fatherland.  He loved her so that he left without
+answers the charming letters which Baroness Dinati wrote him from Paris,
+so far away now, and the more serious missives which he received from his
+compatriots, wishing him to utilize for his country, now that he had
+returned to it, his superior intelligence, as he had formerly utilized
+his courage.
+
+"The hour is critical," wrote his old friends.  "An attempt is being made
+to awaken in Hungary, against the Russians, whom we like, memories of
+combats and extinct hatreds, and that to the profit of a German alliance,
+which is repugnant to our race.  Bring the support of your name and your
+valor to our cause.  Enter the Diet of Hungary.  Your place is marked out
+for you there in the first rank, as it was in the old days upon the
+battlefield."
+
+Andras only smiled.
+
+"If I were ambitious!"  he said to Marsa.  Then he added: "But I am
+ambitious only for your happiness."
+
+Marsa's happiness!  It was deep, calm, and clear as a lake.  It seemed to
+the Tzigana that she was dreaming a dream, a beautiful dream, a dream
+peaceful, sweet, and restful.  She abandoned herself to her profound
+happiness with the trustfulness of a child.  She was all the more happy
+because she had the exquisite sensation that her dream would have no
+awakening.  It would end in all the charm of its poetry.
+
+She was sure that she could not survive the immense joy which destiny had
+accorded her; and she did not rebel against this decree.  It seemed to
+her right and just.  She had never desired any other ending to her love
+than to die beloved, to die with Andras's kiss of forgiveness upon her
+lips, with his arms about her, and to sink with a smile into the eternal
+sleep.  What more beautiful thing could she, the Tzigana, have wished?
+
+When the Prince's people saluted her by that title of "Princess" which
+was hers, she trembled as if she had usurped it; she wished to be Marsa
+to the Prince, Marsa, his devoted slave, who looked at him with her great
+eyes full of gratitude and love.  And she wished to be only that.  It
+seemed to her that, in the ancient home of the Zilahs, the birthplace of
+soldiers, the eyrie of eagles, she was a sort of stranger; but, at the
+same time, she thought, with a smile:
+
+"What matters it?  It is for so short a time."
+
+One day Prince Zilah received from Vienna a large sealed envelope.
+Minister Ladany earnestly entreated him to come to the Austrian capital
+and present, in the salons of Vienna and at the imperial court, Princess
+Zilah, of whose beauty the Austrian colony of Paris raved.
+
+Marsa asked the Prince what the letter contained.
+
+"Nothing.  An invitation to leave our solitude.  We are too happy here."
+
+Marsa questioned him no further; but she resolved that she would never
+allow the Prince to take her to that court which claimed his presence.
+In her eyes, she was always the Tzigana; and, although Menko was dead,
+she would never permit Zilah to present her to people who might have
+known Count Michel.
+
+No, no, let them remain in the dear old castle, he living only for her,
+she breathing only for him; and let the world go, with its fascinations
+and its pleasures, its false joys and its false friendships!  Let them
+ask of life only what truth it possesses; an hour of rest between two
+ordeals, a smile between two sobs, and--the right to love each other.
+To love each other until that fatal separation which she felt was coming,
+until that end which was fast advancing; her poor, frail body being now
+only the diaphanous prison of her soul.  She did not complain, as she
+felt the hour gently approach when, with a last kiss, a last sigh, she
+must say to Andras, Adieu!
+
+He, seeing her each day more pale, each day more feeble, was alarmed;
+but he hoped, that, when the winter, which was very severe there, was
+over, Marsa would regain her strength.  He summoned to the castle a
+physician from Vienna, who battled obstinately and skilfully against the
+malady from which the Tzigana was suffering.  Her weakness and languor
+kept Marsa, during the cold months, for whole days before the lofty,
+sculptured chimney-piece, in which burned enormous logs of oak.  As the
+flames gave a rosy tinge to her cheeks and made her beautiful eyes
+sparkle, Andras said to herself, as he watched her, that she would live,
+live and be happy with him.
+
+The spring came, with the green leaflets and the white blossoms at the
+ends of the branches.  The buds opened and the odors of the rejuvenated
+earth mounted subtly into the soft air.
+
+At her window, regarding the young grass and the masses of tender verdure
+in which clusters of pale gold or silvery white gleamed like aigrettes,
+Marsa said to Andras:
+
+"It must be lovely at Maisons, in the Vale of Violets!"  but she added,
+quickly:
+
+"We are better here, much better!  And it even seems to me that I have
+always, always lived here in this beautiful castle, where you have
+sheltered me, like a swallow beaten by the wind."
+
+There was, beneath the window, stretching out like a ribbon of silver, a
+road, which the mica dust caused, at times, in the sunlight to resemble a
+river.  Marsa often looked out on this road, imagining that she saw again
+the massive dam upon the Seine, or wondering whether a band of Tzigani
+would not appear there with the April days.
+
+"I should like," she said one day to Andras, "to hear again the airs my
+people used to play."
+
+She found that, with the returning spring, she was more feeble than she
+had ever been.  The first warmth in the air entered her veins like a
+sweet intoxication.  Her head felt heavy, and in her whole body she felt
+a pleasant languor.  She had wished to sink thus to rest, as nature was
+awakening.
+
+The doctor seemed very uneasy at this languidness, of which Marsa said:
+
+"It is delicious!"
+
+He whispered one evening to Andras:
+
+"It is grave!"
+
+Another sorrow was to come into the life of the Prince, who had known so
+many.
+
+A few days after, with a sort of presentiment, he wrote to Yanski Varhely
+to come and spend a few months with him.  He felt the need of his old
+friend; and the Count hastened to obey the summons.
+
+Varhely was astonished to see the change which so short a time had
+produced in Marsa.  In seven months her face, although still beautiful,
+had become emaciated, and had a transparent look.  The little hand, white
+as snow, which she gave to Varhely, burned him; the skin was dry and hot.
+
+"Well, my dear Count," said Marsa, as she lay extended in a reclining-
+chair, "what news of General Vogotzine?"
+
+"The General is well.  He hopes to return to Russia.  The Czar has been
+appealed to, and he does not say no."
+
+"Ah!  that is good news," she said.  "He must be greatly bored at
+Maisons; poor Vogotzine!"
+
+"He smokes, drinks, takes the dogs out--"
+
+The dogs!  Marsa started.  Those hounds would survive Menko, herself,
+the love which she now tasted as the one joy of her life!  Mechanically
+her lips murmured, too low to be heard: "Ortog!  Bundas!"
+
+Then she said, aloud:
+
+"I shall be very, glad if the poor General can return to St. Petersburg
+or Odessa.  One is best off at home, in one's own country.  If you only
+knew, Varhely, how happy I am, happy to be in Hungary.  At home!"
+
+She was very weak.  The doctor made a sign to Andras to leave her for a
+moment.
+
+"Well," asked the Prince anxiously of Varhely, "how do you think she is?"
+
+"What does the doctor say?"  replied Yanski.  "Does he hope to save her?"
+
+Zilah made no response.  Varhely's question was the most terrible of
+answers.
+
+Ensconced in an armchair, the Prince then laid bare his heart to old
+Varhely, sitting near him.  She was about to die, then!  Solitude!  Was
+that to be the end of his life?  After so many trials, it was all to end
+in this: an open grave, in which his hopes were to be buried.  What
+remained to him now?  At the age when one has no recourse against fate,
+love, the one love of his life, was to be taken away from him.  Varhely
+had administered justice, and Zilah had pardoned--for what?  To watch
+together a silent tomb; yes, yes, what remained to him now?
+
+"What remains to you if she dies?"  said old Yanski, slowly.  "There
+remains to you what you had at twenty years, that which never dies.
+There remains to you what was the love and the passion of all the Zilah
+princes who lie yonder, and who experienced the same suffering, the same
+torture, the same despair, as you.  There remains to you our first love,
+my dear Andras, the fatherland!"
+
+The next day some Tzigana musicians, whom the Prince had sent for,
+arrived at the castle.  Marsa felt invigorated when she heard the
+czimbalom and the piercing notes of the czardas.  She had been longing
+for those harmonies and songs which lay so near her heart.  She listened,
+with her hand clasped in that of Andras, and through the open window came
+the "March of Rakoczy," the same strains which long ago had been played
+in Paris, upon the boat which bore them down the Seine that July morning.
+
+An heroic air, a song of triumph, a battle-cry, the gallop of horses, a
+chant of victory.  It was the air which had saluted their betrothal like
+a fanfare.  It was the chant which the Tzigani had played that sad night
+when Andras's father had been laid in the earth of Attila.
+
+"I would like," said Marsa, when the music had ceased, "to go to the
+little village where my mother rests.  She was a Tzigana also!  Like
+them, like me!  Can I do so, doctor?"
+
+The doctor shook his head.
+
+"Oh, Princess, not yet!  Later, when the warm sun comes."
+
+"Is not that the sun?"  said Marsa, pointing to the April rays entering
+the old feudal hall and making the bits of dust dance like sparks of
+gold.
+
+"It is the April sun, and it is sometimes dangerous for--"
+
+The doctor paused; and, as he did not finish, Marsa said gently, with a
+smile which had something more than resignation in it--happiness:
+
+"For the dying?"
+
+Andras shuddered; but Marsa's hand, which held his, did not even tremble.
+
+Old Varhely's eyes were dim with tears.
+
+She knew that she was about to die.  She knew it, and smiled at kindly
+death.  It would take away all shame.  Her memory would be to Andras the
+sacred one of the woman he adored.  She would die without being held to
+keep that oath she had made not to survive her dreamed-of happiness, the
+union she had desired and accepted.  Yes, it was sweet and welcome, this
+death, which taking her from Andras's love, washed away all stain.
+
+She whispered in his ear the oft-repeated avowal:
+
+"I love you!  I love you!  I love you!  And I die content, for I feel
+that you will love me always.  Think a moment!  Could I live?  Would
+there not be a spectre between you and your Marsa?"
+
+She threw her arms about him as he leaned over the couch upon which she
+lay, and he made a gesture of denial, unable to speak, for each word
+would have been a sob.
+
+"Oh, do not deny it!"  she said.  "Now, no.  But later, who knows?
+On the other hand, you see, there will be no other phantom near you but
+mine, no other image but mine.  I feel that I shall be always near you,
+yes, always, eternally, my beloved!  Dear death!  blessed death!  which
+renders our love infinite, yes, infinite.  Ah, I love you! I love you!"
+
+She wished to see once more, through the open window, the sunny woods and
+the new blossoms.  Behind those woods, a few leagues away, was the place
+where Tisza was buried.
+
+"I should like to rest by her side," said the Tzigana.  "I am not of your
+family, you see.  A princess, I?  your wife?  I have been only your
+sweetheart, my Andras."
+
+Andras, whiter than the dying girl, seemed petrified by the approach of
+the inevitable grief.
+
+Now, as they went slowly down the white road, the Tzigani played the
+plaintive melancholy air of Janos Nemeth, that air impregnated with
+tears, that air which she used so often to play herself--
+"The World holds but One Fair Maiden!"
+
+And this time, bursting into tears, he said to her, with his heart
+breaking in his breast:
+
+"Yes, there is but thee, Marsa!  but thee, my beloved, thee, thee alone !
+Do not leave me!  Stay with me!  Stay with me, Marsa, my only love!"
+
+Then, as she listened, over the lovely face of the Tzigana passed an
+expression of absolute, perfect happiness, as if, in Zilah's tears, she
+read all his forgiveness, all his love, all his devotion.  She raised
+herself, her little hands resting upon the window-sill, her head heavy
+with sleep--the deep, dreamless sleep-and held up her sweet lips to him:
+when she felt Andras's kiss, she whispered, so that he barely heard it:
+
+"Do not forget me!  Never forget me, my darling!"  Then her head drooped
+slowly, and fell upon the Prince's shoulder, like that of a tired child,
+with a calm sweet smile upon her flower-like face.
+
+Like the salute they had once given to Prince Sandor, the Tzigani began
+proudly the heroic march of free Hungary, their music sending a fast
+farewell to the dead as the sun gave her its last kiss.
+
+Then, as the hymn died slowly away in the distance, soft as a sigh, with
+one last, low, heart-breaking note, Andras Zilah laid the light form of
+the Tzigana upon the couch; and, winding his arms about her, with his
+head pillowed upon her breast, he murmured, in a voice broken with sobs:
+"I will love only, now, what you loved so much, my poor Tzigana.  I will
+love only the land where you lie asleep."
+
+
+
+
+
+ ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+An hour of rest between two ordeals, a smile between two sobs
+Anonymous, that velvet mask of scandal-mongers
+At every step the reality splashes you with mud
+Bullets are not necessarily on the side of the right
+Does one ever forget?
+History is written, not made.
+"I might forgive," said Andras; "but I could not forget
+If well-informed people are to be believe
+Insanity is, perhaps, simply the ideal realized
+It is so good to know nothing, nothing, nothing
+Let the dead past bury its dead!
+Man who expects nothing of life except its ending
+Not only his last love, but his only love
+Pessimism of to-day sneering at his confidence of yesterday
+Sufferer becomes, as it were, enamored of his own agony
+Taken the times as they are
+Unable to speak, for each word would have been a sob
+What matters it how much we suffer
+Why should I read the newspapers?
+Willingly seek a new sorrow
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Prince Zilah, v3
+by Jules Claretie
+
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