Asbestblog

I am currently reading the book "Budapest 1900" by John Lukacs which gives a historical portrait of Budapest and its culture around 1900. The following paragraph gives an example of the unbridgeable, and often tragic, class differences. During his year of military duty the fine Magyar writer Sándor Hunyady, then a simple soldier, met Vilma, a beautiful peasant girl on a Sunday afternoon, when privates and maids on their only afternoon off kept promenading in one of the squares, eager to engage each other in conversation. They fell in love. A week or so later Hunyady (who was the son of a noted writer and a noted actress) was invited to supper in the apartment of a bourgeois family. Their maid happened to be Vilma. When she came into their dining room and saw Hunyady, who had sufficient courage and presence of mind to speak to her, she did not answer. She fled the house in an instant, never to return, and never to see Hunyady again.