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ARNE NOVÁK
CHARLES IV.: I do not know whether the world has grown old. I know that I have grown old and that the words of a man of fifty sound like the prattling of a child to me who am so much younger. In the midst of our forests, at prayers, in the solitude of night, when the window panes are asparkle with the cold stars, old age comes too quickly. But there the spirit is exhorted to firmness,—I fear, perhaps even to pride, unworthy of a true
Christian.
PETRARCH: Of a Christian, who lives righteously, that he may die vainly. Of an Emperor who longs for the virtues of an anchorite.
CHARLES IV.: Yes, it is meekness which becomes almost pride. I have longed to attain the unattainable, to guide my humanity to the superhuman.
PETRARCH (with mournful irony): In the interest of barbarians.
CHARLES IV.: Perhaps my fellow-countrymen are barbarians as yet. They will no longer, God grant, be so. They will have neither the beauty, with which my youth in Avignon was entranced, nor the heroism that your ecstasy has conned from Virgil. They will have another beauty, another heroism. And they, I hope, will also lock towards a new day.
PETRARCH : That they, the barbarians, may
