combat, or rather a butchery, in the sole street of the town, one of the
last massacres of the campaign. The Russians destroyed everything,
shooting down the prisoners, and burning the poor little houses. There
were some women among the Hungarians and Tzigani; they had loaded the
guns of the wounded, comforted the dying and avenged the dead. Many of
them were killed. One of them, the youngest and prettiest, a gypsy, was
seized by the Russian officer, and, when peace was declared soon after,
carried off by him to Russia. This was Tisza Laszlo, Marsa's mother.
The officer, a great Russian nobleman, a handsome fellow and extremely
rich, really loved her with a mad sort of love. He forced her to become
his mistress; but he tried in every way to make her pardon the brutality
of his passion; keeping her half a captive in his castle near Moscow,
and yet offering her, by way of expiation, not only his fortune but his
name, the princely title of which the Tchereteff s, his ancestors, had
been so proud, and which the daughter of wandering Tzigani refused with
mingled hatred and disgust. Princess? She, the gypsy, a Russian
princess? The title would have appeared to her like a new and still more
abhorrent stigma. He implored her, but she was obdurate. It was a
strange, tragic existence these two beings led, shut up in the immense
castle, from the windows of which Tisza could perceive the gilded domes
of Moscow, the superb city in which she would never set her foot,
preferring the palace, sad and gloomy as a cell. Alone in the world,
the sole survivor of her massacred tribe, the Russians to her were the
murderers of her people, the assassins of the free musicians with eagle
profiles she used to follow as they played the czardas from village to
village.

She never saw Prince Tchereteff, handsome, generous, charming, loving her
and trembling before her glance although he had ruthlessly kidnapped her
from her country, that she did not think of him, sword in hand, entering