Austria is not to be found in the Alps, where you can find edelweiss, chamois and gentians but never a trace of the double eagle. The body politic of Austria is nourished and constantly replenished from the Crown Lands.’

Baron Kovacs, a young nobleman from a Hungarian army family, clamped his monocle in his eye, as he always did when he felt called upon to say something particularly important. He spoke the hard, singsong German of Hungary, not so much because he had to, but out of the coquetry of protest. At the same time the blood mantled his crumpled face, which resembled nothing so much as insufficiently yeasted bread, being heavy and abnormal. ‘The Hungarians suffer most of all under this Dual Monarchy,’ he said. It was his statement of faith and not a word of it could be withdrawn. He bored us all, but he infuriated Chojnicki who, although the oldest of us, was also the most temperamental. Chojnicki’s standard reply was inevitable. As was his practice, he repeated: ‘The Hungarians, my dear Kovacs, oppress all the following peoples: Slovaks, Rumanians, Croats, Serbs, Ruthenians, Bosnians, Swabians from the Bacska and the Saxons of Transylvania.’ He counted the races on the widespread fingers of his beautiful, slender and powerful hands.

Kovacs replaced his monocle on the table. Chojnicki’s words seemed not to have reached him. I know what I know, he thought, as usual. Quite often he used to say so aloud.

He was, on the whole, a harmless, even at times a goodhearted young man; and I could not stand him. Nevertheless I made a conscious effort towards some friendly feeling for him. I really suffered because I could not stand him, and with good reason, for I was in love with his sister. Her name was Elizabeth and she was nineteen.

For a long time I fought, vainly, against this love, not so much because I felt myself endangered by it, but because I feared the unspoken scorn of my sceptical friends. In those days, just before the Great War, there prevailed a disdainful pride, an overweaning self-identification with ‘decadence’, so-called, with a half-assumed, over-acted weariness and unfounded boredom. In this atmosphere there was hardly room for sentiment. As for passion, that was in the worst of taste. My friends had small unimportant liaisons with women whom they would put aside, and indeed sometimes lend out, like overcoats; women whom one forgot, like umbrellas, or left behind on purpose like heavy parcels, for which one does not trouble to look for fear that they might be brought back. The circle in which I moved considered love an aberration, engagement a form of apoplexy, marriage an incurable disease.We were young. We regarded marriage, indeed, as an inescapable part of life, just as we recognized that in twenty or thirty years arterio-sclerosis must inevitably set in. I could have found many opportunities to be alone with the girl, although in those days it was taken for granted that a young lady could not spend more than an hour alone with a young gentleman without an acceptable excuse. I took advantage of only a few of these opportunities. As I said, to have taken them all would have shamed me in the eyes of my friends. Indeed, I was at pains to ensure that nothing of my feelings was observed and I often used to worry that one or other of my circle might well know something of the matter, that I might already have betrayed myself in one way or another. When, on occasion, I joined my friends unexpectedly I would assume from their sudden silence that, just before my arrival, they had been discussing my love for Elizabeth Kovacs. I would be put out, as if I had been caught out doing something wrong, or as if some impermissible and secret weakness had been discovered in me. During the few hours, however, which I spent alone with Elizabeth I seemed to sense the lack of meaning and, indeed, of responsibility in my friends’ scorn, scepticism and arrogant ‘decadence’.Yet at the same time I suffered from a kind of nagging conscience at having betrayed their sacred principles. I therefore led, in a certain sense, a double life, and I found that it did not agree with me at all.

Elizabeth was at that time beautiful, gentle, delicate, and without question attracted to me. The smallest, the very least of her movements and gestures moved me profoundly, for I found that every nuance of her hand or head, every swing of her foot and smoothing of her coat, each delicate lifting of her veil, the way she sipped her coffee, the unexpected flower on her dress, even the way she slipped off her glove, betrayed a clear and unmistakable inclination for me, and for me alone.