"What do you say?" cried I, in a perfect passion.
"It is a fact known to everybody."
"Petöfi's wife! Then what has become of Petöfi?"
"He fell at the battle of Segesvár."
"Who saw him fall?"
"A Honved officer who testified to the fact. This was quite enough for his widow. She immediately went to the altar with another young writer, who was not perhaps such a knightly hero as your friend, but who is a pleasant young man in a good official position, moving in the best society, and who is able to assure his wife a comfortable existence."
Every one of this woman's words went right through my heart.
Now, indeed, after years have elapsed, I can say that poor Julia did well to confide her fate to a good and worthy man. She had a child, and had duties towards that child. But at that moment a heavier blow could not have descended upon my head. The death of our martyrs, let it be never so cruel, was not nearly such terrible news to me as the news that the martyrs had been forgotten.
That any woman could ever forget Petöfi! The woman whom the poet had encompassed with the rays of his soul of flame! That the poet should be able to make himself immortal to the whole world and not to her whom he had worshipped!
No doubt the widow was right, she will be blessed in the next world, and there Petöfi himself will justify her—the righteous are always just; but to me this news seemed to open the very gates of hell. If the grass can grow so quickly over my overthrown idol, what am I, I should like to know? A frog enclosed in a tree, whose calling it is to live for a hundred years—beneath the bark!