František Xaver Šalda

“ This chase after youth did not last long; it soon turned into a chase after death. Count Christopher of a sudden stumbled over the stump of a tree and fell heavily, knocking his temple against one of the boulders which were lying about in this part of the grounds. He fell without a sound.
‘Look at the monster . . . so old and so sinful!’ said one of the footmen, who had been called by the girls.
‘What do you expect? A good horse will die in harness,’ said the other and grinned. He did not know that he had summed up Count Christopher’s philosophy in these words. ”

“ Under the influence of the sun’s hot rays he remembered steep terraces covered with olive trees, wonderful olive trees, hundreds of years old, peopled with wood sprites; eloquent as a grave; personal in their individuality, like great men. He remembered olive-mills driven by rushing waters amid moss and ferns, and hands of women working among these terraces generation after generation. ”

“ He had taken his wonted walk through the bizarre plantation, but to-day he had tarried longer over it. He had stood still in places which he avoided as a rule, from which he would purposely turn away. For a long time he had stood looking at a small tree in a round wooden tub which the gardener had just carried out from the hothouse; it was a Taggiasca, the rarest kind of olive, which covers the steep hillsides of Porto Mauricio on the Italian Riviera. ”

“ A few were taken out of the hothouses when the weather was fine, and placed by the gardeners in the exact positions in which the aged count liked to see them, so that close to a group of fine, bristling Northern firs, stunted olives, oranges and lemon trees would languish in wooden tubs, sheltered from the north wind, and unfold their large blossoms. ”

“ But Count Christopher possessed a still more fastidious discretion. He often thought of the distinguished old man, depressed with age, fame, and especially with an intolerable ennui and sterile melancholy. ”

“ But Lisa had been rotting for a score of years in the chapel vault, and the players of the Haydn Quartet had been dispersed even longer than that, and fate had blown them hither and thither before throwing their bones into the cemeteries of various countries.
‘Very good, Your Honour,’ the lackeys would answer by the doctor’s orders, and wink at each other.
There was one thing in real life which could still excite the aged count: the naked feet of women, of the labouring women who worked in the plantations, and were sometimes obliged to pass him on their way. ”