He sometimes called heroism a trick; and yet, in everyday life, he had not much regard for tricksters.  Excessively fond of movement, activity, and excitement, he yet counted among his happiest days those spent in long meditations and inactive dreams.  He was a strange combination of faults and good qualities, without egregious vices, but all his virtues capable of being annihilated by passion, anger, jealousy, or grief.  With such a nature, everything was possible:  the sublimity of devotion, or a fall into the lowest infamy.  He often said, in self-analysis:  “I am afraid of myself.”  In short, his strength was like a house built upon sand; all, in a day, might crumble.

“If I had to choose the man I should prefer to be,” he said once, “I would be Prince Andras Zilah, because he knows neither my useless discouragements, apropos of everything and nothing, nor my childish delights, nor my hesitations, nor my confidence, which at times approaches folly as my misanthropy approaches injustice; and because, in my opinion, the supreme virtue in a man is firmness.”

The Zilahs were connected by blood with the Menkos, and Prince Andras was very fond of this young man, who promised to Hungary one of those diplomats capable of wielding at once the pen and the sword, and who in case of war, before drawing up a protocol, would have dictated its terms, sabre in hand.  Michel indeed stood high with his chief in the embassy, and he was very much sought after in society.  Before the day he met Marsa, he had, to tell the truth, only experienced the most trivial love-affairs.

He did not speak of his wife at Pau any more than he did on the boulevards.  She lived far away, in the old city of Prague, and troubled Michel no more than if she had never existed.  Perhaps he had forgotten, really forgotten, with that faculty of forgetfulness which belongs to the imaginative, that he was married, when he encountered Marsa, the candid, pure-hearted girl, who did not reflect nor calculate, but simply believed that she had met a man of honor.

So, what sudden revolt, humiliation, and hatred did the poor child feel when she learned that the man in whom she had believed as in a god had deceived her, lied to her!  He was married.  He had treated her as the lowest of women; perhaps he had never even loved her!  The very thought made her long to kill herself, or him, or both.  She, unhappy, miserable woman, was ruined, ruined forever!

She had certainly never stopped to think where the love she had for Michel would lead her.  She thought of nothing except that Michel was hers, and she was his, and she believed that their love would last forever.  She did not think that she had long to live, and her existence seemed to her only a breath which any moment might cease.  Why had she not died before she knew that Menko had lied?

All deception seemed hideous to Marsa Laszlo, and this hideousness she had discovered in the man to whom she had given herself, believing in the eternity as well as in the loyalty of his love.