Prince off the product of his lessons and a small remnant he had
managed to save from the wreck of his property.
"Hungary will spring up again, Yanski; Hungary is immortal!" Andras would
exclaim.
"Yes, on one condition," was Varhely's response. "She must arrive at a
comprehension that if she has succumbed, it is because she has committed
faults. All defeats have their geneses. Before the enemy we 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
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