e were not
a unit. There were too many discussions, and not enough action; such a
state of affairs is always fatal."

The years brought happy changes to Hungary. She practically regained her
freedom; by her firmness she made the conquest of her own autonomy by
the side of Austria. Deak's spirit, in the person of Andrassy, recovered
the possession of power. But neither Andras nor Varhely returned to
their country. The Prince had become, as he himself said with a smile,
"a Magyar of Paris." He grew accustomed to the intellectual, refined
life of the French city; and this was a consolation, at times, for the
exile from his native land.

"It is not a difficult thing to become bewitched with Paris," he would
say, as if to excuse himself.

He had no longer, it is true, the magnificent landscapes of his youth;
the fields of maize, the steppes, dotted here and there with clumps of
wild roses; the Carpathian pines, with their sombre murmur; and all
the evening sounds which had been his infancy's lullaby; the cowbells,
melancholy and indistinct; the snapping of the great whips of the
czikos; the mounted shepherds, with their hussar jackets, crossing the
plains where grew the plants peculiar to the country; and the broad
horizons with the enormous arms of the windmills outlined against the
golden sunset. But Paris, with its ever-varying seductions, its activity
in art and science, its perpetual movement, had ended by becoming a real
need to him, like a new existence as precious and as loved as the first.
The soldier had become a man of letters, jotting down for himself, not
for the public, all that struck him in his observation and his reading;
mingling in all societies, knowing them all, but esteeming only one,
that of honest people; and thus letting the years pass by, without
suspecting that they were flying, regarding himself somewhat as a man
away on a visit, and suddenly awaking one fine morning almost old,
wondering how he had lived all this time of exile which, despite many
mental troubles, seemed to him to have lasted only a few months.

"We resemble," he said to Varhely, "those emigrants who never unpack
their boxes, certain that they are soon to return home. They wait, and
some day, catching a glimpse of themselves in a glass, they are amazed
to find wrinkles and gray hairs."

No longer having a home in his own country, Prince Andras had never
dreamed of making another abroad. He hired the sumptuous hotel he
inhabi