Alföld, or great Hungarian plain, and young Jókai was sent down thither as one of his chief agents; but, as if to illustrate that singular blend of common sense and exaltation which has always characterized the Magyar in politics, the ardent author of "Hétköznapok" was accompanied by a sort of bodyguard of soberer youths, who were to cut him short without ceremony whenever his eloquence carried him too far. It was on this occasion that Jókai enlisted the services of the famous robber-chief, Alexander Rózsa,[2] for the national cause, and obtained his pardon from the Government. On the outbreak of the Vienna Revolution at the beginning of October, Kossuth sent Jókai and Csernátonai to promise the Viennese assistance, but the movement was crushed before any such assistance could be rendered. In the beginning of December, Jókai accepted the invitation of the publishers, Landerer and Heckenast, to edit the leading Pest newspaper, Pesti Hirlap, in place of Csengery, who had become a member of the Government. He[Pg xxviii] announced, as the substance of his programme, the bringing about of "the unity and independence of the Hungarian State." After subjugating Vienna, the Austrian army advanced against Pest. On December 30 the inhabitants threw up earthworks at the foot of the Gilbert hill, working night and day without distinction of age or sex, Jókai and his wife amongst them. After the battle of Móor, January 1, 1849, when the Imperialists defeated Perczel and his Honvéds, the Jókais followed the Hungarian Government to Debreczen. Here also Jókai supported himself by journalism, and on February 22 started the Esti Lapok as the organ of the Constitutional Liberals as opposed to the Marczius Tizenötödike, the organ of the extreme Radicals. Yet Jókai himself was not infrequently carried away by his patriotism, and actually proclaimed the republic in his newspaper two days before the Diet unanimously dethroned the Hapsburgs (April 14, 1849). When the Honvéds recaptured the fortress of Buda, the Government and the Diet returned to Pest, and Jókai, as editor of both the Esti Lapok and the Pesti Hirlap, powerfully contributed to encourage the nation in its struggle for independence. In a month's time, however, the Hungarian Government, now threatened by a combination of the Russians and Austrians, were obliged to take refuge, first at Szegedin, and finally at Arad, Jókai accompanying them to both places. He has described this portion of his life in a few eloquent sentences. "Out into the desolate world we went, in the depths of a Siberian winter, with everything crackling with cold, forcing our way along through the snowy desert of the Alföld, with the retreating Honvéd army, passing the night in an inhospitable hut, where the closed door had frozen to the ground by the morning, and the roll of drums and the blare of trumpets aroused us to toil on still further. . . . My wife went everywhere with me. She quitted a comfortable home, sacrificed a fortune, a brilliant career, to endure hunger, cold, and hardship with me. And I never heard her utter one word of complaint. When I was downhearted she comforted me. And, when all my hopes were stifled, she shared her hopes with me. And she worked like the wife of a Siberian convict. She did not play the part of a peasant girl now, she was a serving woman in grim earnest."

After the catastrophe of Világos, when the unconquerable Görgei voluntarily surrendered the last fragments of his exhausted army to the Russians so as to baulk the Austrians of a triumph they did not deserve, Jókai was saved from captivity by the ingenious audacity of János Rákóczy, Kossuth's secretary, who hired a carriage and horses, disguised himself as a coachman, and, with the utmost nonchalance, drove right through the advancing Muscovites. Picking up his wife again at Gyula, Jókai set off for the remote little hamlet of Tardoná, a place "walled off from the rest of the world" by dense beech forests, where hundreds of thousands of pigs were every year fattened for the Servian market. Here Jókai lived at the house of his friend, the local magistrate, Béni Csányi, for nearly six months, principally occupied in landscape painting, while his indefatigable wife hastened back to Pest to resume her engagement at the National Theatre (they had for the time no other means of subsistence), and attempt to save him from proscription. From August to the middle of October Jókai knew absolutely nothing of what was going on in the world. Tardoná was a corner of the earth whither no visitor ever came, and where the inhabitants themselves went nowhither. At last his wife rejoined him, and told him that his hermit-like seclusion would soon be over. She then took from her bosom a carefully concealed tiny grey schedule, which was a great treasure in those days. It was the guarantee of his liberation—a common passport. It should be explained that when the fortress of Comorn capitulated, months after the war was over everywhere else, it was on condition that every officer of the garrison should be provided with a passport guaranteeing his life and liberty, and dispensing him from enrolment in the Austrian army. Jókai's wife had contrived to procure for him such a passport in the simplest way in the world. A friend of hers, Vincent Szathmary, wrote Jókai's name down on the list of the capitulating officers as a third lieutenant, and handed the passport bearing his name to his wife. This had been Madame Jókai's idea from the first, and was the reason why Jókai had been hidden away so carefully by her among the beech forests of Tardoná till she had safely carried out her innocent conspiracy.

Jókai's life was now safe, but extreme caution was still by no means superfluous. It was not till some time later that he ventured to return to Pest from Miskólcz under the pseudonym of János Kovács,[3] living most of the time at his wife's lodgings, or at an inn among the hills of Buda. The military government (Hungary was then under martial law, with Czechs in all the chief posts of trust) was inclined to be indulgent to literature, but spies and traitors were about, and to his eternal shame a Magyar lawyer, Hegyesi by name, hoping to curry favour with the authorities at Vienna, informed against Jókai and thirty-four other Hungarian writers, whom he pronounced worthy of death. They were defended in a long memorial by their countryman, the advocate, János Kossalko, who demonstrated that the Hungarian literature was not the cause of the Hungarian