Arne Novák

“ It seems to me—if I understand your language aright—that the thought of home has marked me out somehow in the same way as your pagan poet did to you. But pray enlarge unto me, how could Virgil thus preserve and liberate you?
PETRARCH: I fear, Sire, that my words will not be a kindly entertainment for the shades of a November evening. It is chill, it is dark, and the fountain is lamenting piteously in the courtyard. At this moment the distant stars exhort us to slumber. ”

“ And does your pagan poet lead you thus to salvation? I should marvel if you succeeded in convincing me of this.
PETRARCH: O, to convince you, Sire, to gain possession of your faith, to hold sway over your will, that you might remain with us, with the people, with your brothers and fellow-countrymen here, in Italy, here in the South.
CHARLES IV.: Do not forget that I am a Northerner. Black pine-forests overshadow the dark castles where my inmost thought finds its God. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Your North is an evil dream, dark horror, which has saturated your veins with the blood of your mother. Your kindly favour, Sire, invites me ever afresh to your Northern city, which by your wisdom and love you have transformed into a wonderful legend ”

“ 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 have led, from what I know, to the summits where a broad survey has entranced you, and where the wings of superhuman self-fathoming have borne your human attributes yonder close to the footstool of the divine throve, so that we Christians were at a loss even for the breath of anguish at so haughty a sin. ”

“ The certainty that life and not death, courageous action and not penitent prayer shall deserve our whole love, draws closer to us those ancestors of old, from the army of Aeneas and Turnus, from the pastoral throng of Euryalus and Menaleus. ”