library shows a beautiful woman of intense sensitiveness, into whose
face some of the sadness of her rôles seems to have crept. It was to her
powers of impersonation and disguise that Jókai owed his life many years
later, when, imprisoned and suffering in a dungeon, he was enabled to
escape in her clothes to join Kossuth in the desperate fight against the
allied armies of Austria and Russia. Since her death he has lived in
retirement.

The bloodless revolution of 1848, which suddenly transformed Hungary
into a modern state, possessing civil and religious liberty for which
the young idealists led by Kossuth had labored with such passionate
zeal, was not effected without antagonizing the old aristocracy, all of
whose cherished institutions were suddenly swept away; or the
semi-barbaric people of the peasant class, who could little appreciate
the beneficent reforms. Into the awful civil war that followed, when the
horrors of an Austrian-Russian invasion were added to the already
desperate situation, Jókai plunged with magnificent heroism. Side by
side with Kossuth, he fought with sword and pen. Those who heard him
deliver an address at the Peace Congress at Brussels two years ago felt
through his impassioned eloquence that the man had himself drained the
bitterest dregs of war.

While Kossuth lived in exile in England and the United States, and many
other compatriots escaped to Turkey and beyond, Jókai, in concealment at
home, writing under an assumed name and with a price on his head,
continued his work for social reform, until a universal pardon was
granted by Austria and the saddened idealists once more dared show their
faces in devastated Hungary.

Ripe with experience and full of splendid intellectual power, Jókai now