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The Piccolomini

Год написания книги
2017
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The arch-foe of his emperor.

WALLENSTEIN (laughs)

I know,
I know you had already in Vienna
Your windows and your balconies forestalled
To see him on the executioner's cart.
I might have lost the battle, lost it too
With infamy, and still retained your graces —
But, to have cheated them of a spectacle,
Oh! that the good folks of Vienna never,
No, never can forgive me!

QUESTENBERG

So Silesia
Was freed, and all things loudly called the duke
Into Bavaria, now pressed hard on all sides.
And he did put his troops in motion: slowly,
Quite at his ease, and by the longest road
He traverses Bohemia; but ere ever
He hath once seen the enemy, faces round,
Breaks up the march, and takes to winter-quarters.

WALLENSTEIN

The troops were pitiably destitute
Of every necessary, every comfort,
The winter came. What thinks his majesty
His troops are made of? Aren't we men; subjected
Like other men to wet, and cold, and all
The circumstances of necessity?
Oh, miserable lot of the poor soldier!
Wherever he comes in all flee before him,
And when he goes away the general curse
Follows him on his route. All must be seized.
Nothing is given him. And compelled to seize
From every man he's every man's abhorrence.
Behold, here stand my generals. Karaffa!
Count Deodati! Butler! Tell this man
How long the soldier's pay is in arrears.

BUTLER

Already a full year.

WALLENSTEIN

And 'tis the hire
That constitutes the hireling's name and duties,
The soldier's pay is the soldier's covenant.[8 - The original is not translatable into English: —– Und sein SoldMuss dem Soldaten werden, darnach heisst er.It might perhaps have been thus rendered: —And that for which he sold his services,The soldier must receive —but a false or doubtful etymology is no more than a dull pun.]

QUESTENBERG

Ah! this is a far other tone from that
In which the duke spoke eight, nine years ago.

WALLENSTEIN

Yes! 'tis my fault, I know it: I myself
Have spoilt the emperor by indulging him.
Nine years ago, during the Danish war,
I raised him up a force, a mighty force,
Forty or fifty thousand men, that cost him
Of his own purse no doit. Through Saxony
The fury goddess of the war marched on,
E'en to the surf-rocks of the Baltic, bearing
The terrors of his name. That was a time!
In the whole imperial realm no name like mine
Honored with festival and celebration —
And Albrecht Wallenstein, it was the title
Of the third jewel in his crown!
But at the Diet, when the princes met
At Regensburg, there, there the whole broke out,
There 'twas laid open, there it was made known
Out of what money-bag I had paid the host,
And what were now my thanks, what had I now
That I, a faithful servant of the sovereign,
Had loaded on myself the people's curses,
And let the princes of the empire pay
The expenses of this war that aggrandizes
The emperor alone. What thanks had I?
What? I was offered up to their complaint
Dismissed, degraded!

QUESTENBERG

But your highness knows
What little freedom he possessed of action
In that disastrous Diet.

WALLENSTEIN

Death and hell!
I had that which could have procured him freedom
No! since 'twas proved so inauspicious to me
To serve the emperor at the empire's cost,
I have been taught far other trains of thinking
Of the empire and the Diet of the empire.
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