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.