Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/231

 adventurer, lover, and man of the world. Most of them he had planted in this curious garden with his own hands. They were a secret code in which he had written down the most interesting part of his life-story. The idea had been suggested to him at the Vallée aux Loups, where as a young attaché he had visited Chateaubriand, who interested him as a great diplomatist, not as a poet. 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. Chateaubriand had taken his young colleague round the garden, his face overshadowed with the cool cloud of a silent pride, and had shown him with a short, tired movement of his hand the cedars from Lebanon and the pines from Champagne which he had brought back from his travels. Count Christopher never could understand why this man had written his Mémoires d’outre tombe, when he had created this singular park for the reception of his memories. And because of his not understanding, he showed himself to be more of the aristocrat of the old school than Chateaubriand himself.

Every shrub, every tree had a name; each