Summary
In a gloomy fin-de-siècle Budapest, a dandified stranger—silk gloves hiding cloven composure—sidles up to two radiant newlyweds before a soot-smudged canvas of a flayed saint. Their naïve boast that Virtue is imperishable flickers like a candle in his sulphurous pupils; the stranger, who signs hotel ledgers as "Mr. Harmath," grins as though already tasting ash. Across ballroom soirées, séance parlors, and frost-rimed railway platforms, he loosens tiny screws in their reality: a forged love letter here, a whispered rumor there, until the bride’s laughter crystallizes into hysteria and the groom’s trust rots into gambling mania. Shadows lengthen, clocks misfire, and even the Danube seems to flow backward as the couple’s moral scaffolding collapses—yet every sabotage is staged so elegantly that onlookers blame the victims themselves. When the last mask slips, the Devil does not bask in firelight; instead he wanders into swirling snow, already rehearsing the next pious wager, leaving only the echo of a wager no human remembered making.
Synopsis
The Devil, in the guise of a human, meets a young couple who remark upon looking at a Renaissance painting of a martyr that Evil could never triumph over Good. The Devil, taking this as a challenge, decides to bring about the couple's downfall.
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