But neither Andras nor Varhely returned to their country.

The Prince had become, as he himself said with a smile, "a Magyar of Paris." He grew accustomed to the intellectual, refined life of the French city; and this was a consolation, at times, for the exile from his native land.
"It is not a difficult thing to become bewitched with Paris," he would say, as if to excuse himself.
He had no longer, it is true, the magnificent landscapes of his youth; the fields of maize, the steppes, dotted here and there with clumps of wild roses; the Carpathian pines, with their sombre murmur; and all the evening sounds which had been his infancy's lullaby; the cowbells, melancholy and indistinct; the snapping of the great whips of the czikos; the mounted shepherds, with their hussar jackets, crossing the plains where grew the plants peculiar to the country; and the broad horizons with the enormous arms of the windmills outlined against the golden sunset.

But Paris, with its ever-varying seductions, its activity in art and science, its perpetual movement, had ended by becoming a real need to him, like a new existence as precious and as loved as the first.
The soldier had become a man of letters, jotting down for himself, not for the public, all that struck him in his observation and his reading; mingling in all societies, knowing them all, but esteeming only one, that of honest people; and thus letting the years pass by, without suspecting that they were flying, regarding himself somewhat as a man away on a visit, and suddenly awaking one fine morning almost old, wondering how he had lived all this time of exile which, despite many mental troubles, seemed to him to have lasted only a few months.
"We resemble," he said to Varhely, "those emigrants who never unpack their boxes, certain that they are soon to return home.

They wait, and some day, catching a glimpse of themselves in a glass, they are amazed to find wrinkles and gray hairs." No longer having a home in his own country, Prince Andras had never dreamed of making another abroad.

He hired the sumptuous hotel he inhabited at the top of the Champs Elysees, when houses were rather scattered there.