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felt had overwhelmed her reason. The Officer of the Guards had made her acquaintance on a tour of duty when he was diplomatic courier at the embassy in Paris in the 1850s. They were introduced to each other at a ball, and somehow this meeting had an aura of inevitability. The music played and the Officer of the Guards said in French to the Count’s daughter, “In our country feelings are more intense and more decisive.” It was the embassy ball. Outside, the street was white; it was snowing. At this moment the Emperor of France made his entrance into the ballroom. Everyone made a deep obeisance. The Emperor’s dress coat was blue and his waistcoat white; slowly he raised his gold lorgnon to his eyes. As they both straightened up again, their eyes met. Already they knew that their lives must be together. Pale and self-conscious, they smiled at each other. Music could be heard from the next room. The young French girl said, “Your country—where is it?” and smiled again with a faraway look. The Officer of the Guards told her the name of his homeland. It was the first intimate word to pass between them.
    It was autumn when they came home, almost a year later. The foreign lady sat deep inside the coach, swathed in veils and coverlets. They took the mountain route across Switzerland and the Tyrol. In Vienna they were received by the Emperor and Empress. The Emperor was benevolent, just the way he was always described in children’s textbooks. “Beware,” he said. “In the forest where he’s taking you, there are bears. He’s a bear too.” And he smiled. Everyone smiled. It was a sign of great favor that the Emperor should joke with the French wife of the Hungarian Officer of the Guards. “Majesty,” she replied, “I shall tame him with music, as Orpheus tamed the wild beast.” They journeyed on through fruit-scented meadows and woods. After they crossed the frontier, mountains and cities dwindled away, and the lady began to weep. “Darling, I feel dizzy. There is no end to all of this.” It was the Puszta that made her dizzy, the deserted plain stretching away under the numbing, shimmering blanket of autumn air, now bare after the harvest, transected by primitive roads along which they jolted for hour after hour, while cranes wheeled in the empty sky and the fields of maize on either side lay plundered and broken as if a retreating army had passed through at the end of a war, leaving the landscape a wasteland. The Officer of the Guards sat silently in the coach, his arms crossed. From time to time he ordered a horse to be brought, and he rode for long distances alongside the carriage, observing his native land as if he were seeing it for the first time. He looked at the low houses, with their green shutters and white verandas, where they spent the nights, Magyar houses with their thick-planted gardens all around them, the cool rooms in which every piece of furniture, even the smell in the cupboards, was familiar to him, and the landscape whose melancholy solitude moved him as never before. He saw with his wife’s eyes the wells with their hanging buckets, the parched fields, the rosy clouds above the plain in the sunset. His homeland opened itself before them, and with a beating heart the officer sensed that the landscape that now embraced them also held the secret of their fate. His wife sat in the coach and said nothing. Sometimes she raised a handkerchief to her face, and as she did so, her husband would bend down toward her out of the saddle and cast a questioning glance into her tear-filled eyes. But with a gesture she signaled that they should continue. Their lives were joined together now.
    At first the castle was a comfort to her. It was so large, and the forest and the mountains wrapped themselves around it to isolate it so completely from the plain that it seemed to her to be a home within a new and foreign homeland. And every month a wagon from Paris, from Vienna, would arrive bringing furniture,