"Wherefore doth this race of thralls endure it?
Wherefore rise not? Rend your chains and cure it!
Do ye wait, forsooth! till God's good pleasure
Rusts them off, and makes them drop at leisure?"
And then he would lead me into his room. On the walls there, in handsome frames, hung the portraits of the chiefs of the French Revolution—this was his only luxury—Danton, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, Saint-Juste, Madame Roland. There, too, the parts we were to play were distributed; Saint-Juste was designed for me, Madame Roland for Julia. And then we spoke of "the bloody days." They were to be no mere dream, we were to see them with our eyes wide open. And we were to be among the first to feel them.
A healthy-minded man would have been ready after such words as these to have left the house by jumping out of the window; but they had a charm for me. It suited my peculiar frame of mind just then to set on fire the Dejanira robe that was about me, and then rush out among the people and set them on fire also.
"Man's fate is woman!"
Had that young lady the last time I held her hand in mine said "Stay!" I should certainly have remained. I should have crept into my little nook of bliss and never have gazed after the moonshine of fame. In that case I should now perhaps have been one of the judicial assessors at the Royal Courts, and have joined heartily in the laugh when one or other of my colleagues at the end of a friendly banquet might take it into his head to quote some monstrous sentences out of my earliest romance, an imperfect copy of which turns up now and then as a literary curiosity among other antiquarian rubbish.
This is what would have happened if the young lady had said "Stay!"
But if that young lady had said "Fly!" then I should have flown like the rest after the falling stars. And, indeed, of those who stood with me on the 11th March[30] before the mob on the balcony of the town-hall to announce "This is the day of national liberty!" of those my youthful-visaged, warm-hearted comrades, three have perished in defence of that word "Liberty" then pronounced: those three names are "Petöfi,"[31] "Vasváry," "Bozzai." And certainly, in that case, the four ounces of lead, or the cossack's lance, or the grenade splinter which killed them, might have sufficed for me also—that is, of course, if that young lady had said "Fly!" Fate, in fact, confronted me with this paradox—"Either live and be forgotten, or be remembered as one who died young!"
[30] When the Hungarian revolution of 1848 began.
[31] Petöfi was most probably killed at the battle of Segesvár in July, 1849; at any rate he was never seen or heard of afterwards. He was only twenty-seven, and in him the world lost one of its great lyric poets.
"Stay!" or "Fly!"