Chugur meets three travelers

The meeting of Csongor and the three travelers at the Hármas út tests competing definitions of happiness against his urgent desire to find Tündérhon. The merchant, the prince, and the scholar each appear to possess a route to fulfillment, yet none can direct Csongor to his beloved: the encounter exposes the distance between worldly attainment and the love he seeks.

Setting and the search

In the second act, the scene is set in the region of the Hármas út. Csongor steps onto the crossroads, drawn onward by desire, hope, and expectation. The setting gives the encounter its shape: a place of branching routes becomes a place where possible answers arrive one after another, but none proves to be the road he needs.

The stage direction presents the three travelers as arrivals on this path, beginning with Kalmár. Csongor’s question is not simply where to go in the world. He wants the way to Tündérhon, where he hopes to find a dwelling of happiness and reach the beloved for whom he is searching. He stops each traveler to ask for directions, treating their experience or apparent authority as a possible source of help.

The merchant and wealth

Kalmár enters speaking of far-reaching commercial connections: he names the two Indies as his neighbors and promises that his palace will show friends desired by both heart and mind. Csongor interrupts this self-display and asks where Tündérhon lies, reasoning that a man who travels widely in rich ships, who has seen the sun rise and set in many places, might know the way.

Kalmár answers by turning the question into a diagnosis: he asks whether Csongor is ill and urges him to protect himself. He then strikes his pocket and claims that Tündérhon is there, in the money he carries. The gesture makes his answer concrete, but it also makes the mismatch unmistakable. Csongor calls the merchant’s wealth a cold mine and says that he would not exchange love for all its treasure, not even for love’s name. Better, he insists, for the heart to burn than to be killed by cold. Kalmár’s riches are real, but they cannot serve as directions to the happiness Csongor wants.

The prince and power

The Fejedelem arrives next, speaking in grand terms of Zeus or whatever name the god may bear. His boast presents authority as nearly absolute: while he lives, day and his dominion will know no night. Csongor stops him as he stopped Kalmár, and appeals to the prince’s far-reaching power. Since his extensive realm supposedly has no night, Csongor asks him to say where he must travel to reach Tündérhon.

The prince does not give him the requested direction. His speech instead keeps faith with military struggle, imagining what a beautiful death his battles might afford him, and he leaves. Csongor judges him more contemptuous even than the merchant, and calls him a slave to slaves: wealth and power, for all their apparent command, bind their possessor rather than release him. The prince’s domain may be vast, but its boast of a world without night does not open a path to Csongor’s desired home.

The scholar and the limits of knowledge

After the first two failures, Csongor waits for the scholar, hoping that he may know the dwelling and make him happy through his counsel. The Tudós comes absorbed in thought and announces that he knows everything, with one matter still remaining. Csongor answers that his own questions are few, but that everything depends on them: his young soul longs for Tündérhon; the rich and powerful have failed to tell him where it is, so he asks the scholar to open the treasure-house of knowledge.

The scholar dismisses the beautiful fairy-world as the world of poets, an illusion fit for children. His certainty offers no guidance because it excludes the very possibility Csongor is trying to pursue. He advises a life of motion if the day has grown tiresome, or a condition beyond life if movement itself has become wearying. The advice does not bring Csongor closer to Tündérhon. Instead, the scholar’s learning ends by casting the world as a dark, empty, boundless solitude.

What the encounter reveals

The three travelers form a sequence of failed guides, not because they lack distinct forms of worldly success, but because each treats his own sphere as sufficient. Kalmár points to money; the Fejedelem displays dominion and war; the Tudós claims knowledge while denying the reality of the sought-for fairy-world. Their answers differ, yet all leave Csongor’s central question unanswered.

Csongor does not accept these substitutes as happiness. He measures the merchant’s treasure against love, the prince’s power against freedom, and the scholar’s certainty against the possibility that makes his quest meaningful. After the scholar departs, Csongor asks whether this is all a person lives for and concludes that his travelers do not lead him onward. The crossroads has supplied three directions in thought, but no practical route: the search for Tündérhon remains open, and Csongor continues without a guide among them.