Death in Venice [antikvár]

I Q. spring afternoon of the year 19—, when for several months the situation in Europe had been so menacing, Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach as his name read officially after his fiftieth birthday, had left his residence on the Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich and had gone for a long walk. Overwrought by the trying and precarious work of the forenoon—^which had demanded a maximum wariness, prudence, penetration, and rigor of the will—the writer had not been able even after the noon meal to break the impetus of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi con-tinuus which constitutes, according to Cicero, the foundation of eloquence; and he had not attained the healing sleep which—what with the increasing exhaustion of his strength—he needed in the middle of each day. So he had gone outdoors soon after tea, in the hopes that air and