HE WAS A RASCAL
BY JAN NERUDA
Horáček was dead. Nobody regretted his death, for they knew him throughout all of Small Side.[1] In Small Side people know their neighbors well, perhaps because they know no one else, and when Horáček died they told each other it was a good thing, for by his death his good mother would be relieved, and then, “He was a rascal.” He died in the twenty-fifth year of his age, suddenly, as was stated in the obituary lists. In that list his character was not entered, for the reason, as the chief clerk in the drugstore very wittily remarked, that a rascal really has no character. But how different it would have been if the chief clerk had died! Nobody knew a thing against or about him! Horáček’s corpse was hauled out with other corpses from the public chapel. “As was his life, so was his end,” said the chief clerk in the drugstore. Behind the carriage walked a small group, composed mainly of persons in somewhat holiday attire, and therefore all the more noticeably beggars.
- ↑ Small Side, “Malâ Strana,” is a part of the city of Prague, connected with the Old Town by means of the stone bridge of King Charles erected in 1357.
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