'There was never such a lover since Petrarca,' she said, with a smile. 'Nay, you eclipse him: he was never tried by marriage.'
But though he jested at it, his great love for her seemed like a beautiful light about her life. What did his state-secret matter? What did it matter what cause had led him to avoid political life?—he loved her so well.
The following month they were in Paris, having found an hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain, standing in a great sunny garden; and when they were fairly installed there, the Princess and the children and the horses followed them, and their arrival made an event of great interest and importance in the city which of all others in the world it is hardest thus to impress.
The Countess von Szalras, a notability always, was celebrated just then as the inheritress of the coveted Noira collection, which it had been fondly hoped would have gone to the hammer: and Sabran, popular always, and not forgotten here, where most things and people are forgotten in a week, was courted, flattered, and welcomed by men and by women; and as he rode down the Allée des Acacias, or entered the Mirlitons, he felt himself at home. His beautiful wife, his beautiful children, his incomparable horses, his marvellous good fortune were the talk of all those who had already left their country-houses for the winter rentrée, and attained a publicity, beginning with the great Szalras pearls and ending with the babies' white donkeys, which was the greatest of all possible offences to her; she abhorred and contemned publicity with the sensitiveness of a delicate temper and the contempt of a scornful patrician.
To Sabran it was not so offensive; there was the Slav in him, which loved display, and was not ill-pleased by notoriety. All this admiration around them made him feel that his life after all had been a great success, that he had drawn prizes in the lottery of fate which all men envied him; it helped him to forget Egon Vàsàrhely. He had never so nearly felt affection for Bela as when lines of men and women stood still to watch the handsome child gallop on his pony down the avenues of the Bois.
'Life is after all like baccara or billiards,' he said to himself. 'It is of no use winning unless there be a galerie to look on and applaud.'
And then he felt ashamed of the poorness and triviality of the thought, which was not one he would have expressed to his wife. That very morning, when she had read a long flattery of herself in a journal of fashion, she had cast the sheet from her with disgust on every line of her face.
'We are safe from that, at least, in the Iselthal,' she had said. 'Cannot you make them understand that we are not public artists to need réclames, nor yet sovereigns to be compelled to submit to the microscope? Is this the meaning of civilisation—to make privacy impossible, to oblige every one to live under a lens?'
He had affected to agree with her, but in his heart he had not done so. He liked the fumes of the incense. So did his child.
'They will put this in the papers!' said Bela, when the snow came and he had his sledge out for the first time with four little Hungarian ponies.