The Idiot

he prince observed with great surprise, as he approached his villa,
accompanied by Rogojin, that a large number of people were assembled on
his verandah, which was brilliantly lighted up. The company seemed
merry and were noisily laughing and talking—even quarrelling, to judge
from the sounds. At all events they were clearly enjoying themselves,
and the prince observed further on closer investigation—that all had
been drinking champagne. To judge from the lively condition of some of
the party, it was to be supposed that a considerable quantity of
champagne had been consumed already.

All the guests were known to the prince; but the curious part of the
matter was that they had all arrived on the same evening, as though
with one accord, although he had only himself recollected the fact that
it was his birthday a few moments since.

“You must have told somebody you were going to trot out the champagne,
and that’s why they are all come!” muttered Rogojin, as the two entered
the verandah. “We know all about that! You’ve only to whistle and they
come up in shoals!” he continued, almost angrily. He was doubtless
thinking of his own late experiences with his boon companions.

All surrounded the prince with exclamations of welcome, and, on hearing
that it was his birthday, with cries of congratulation and delight;
many of them were very noisy.

The presence of certain of those in the room surprised the prince
vastly, but the guest whose advent filled him with the greatest
wonder—almost amounting to alarm—was Evgenie Pavlovitch. The prince
could not believe his eyes when he beheld the latter, and could not
help thinking that something was wrong.

Lebedeff ran up promptly to explain the arrival of all these gentlemen.
He was himself somewhat intoxicated, but the prince gathered from his
long-winded periods that the party had assembled quite naturally, and
accidentally.

First of all Hippolyte had arrived, early in the evening, and feeling
decidedly better, had determined to await the prince on the verandah.
There Lebedeff had joined him, and his household had followed—that is,
his daughters and General Ivolgin. Burdovsky had brought Hippolyte, and
stayed on with him. Gania and Ptitsin had dropped in accidentally later
on; then came Keller, and he and Colia insisted on having champagne.
Evgenie Pavlovitch had only dropped in half an hour or so ago. Lebedeff
had served the champagne readily.

“My own though, prince, my own, mind,” he said, “and there’ll be some
supper later on; my daughter is getting it ready now. Come and sit
down, prince, we are all waiting for you, we want you with us. Fancy
what we have been discussing! You know the question, ‘to be or not to
be,’—out of Hamlet! A contemporary theme! Quite up-to-date! Mr.
Hippolyte has been eloquent to a degree. He won’t go to bed, but he has
only drunk a little champagne, and that can’t do him any harm. Come
along, prince, and settle the question. Everyone is waiting for you,
sighing for the light of your luminous intelligence...”

The prince noticed the sweet, welcoming look on Vera Lebedeff’s face,
as she made her way towards him through the crowd. He held out his hand
to her. She took it, blushing with delight, and wished him “a happy
life from that day forward.” Then she ran off to the kitchen, where her
presence was necessary to help in the preparations for supper. Before
the prince’s arrival she had spent some time on the terrace, listening
eagerly to the conversation, though the visitors, mostly under the
influence of wine, were discussing abstract subjects far beyond her
comprehension. In the next room her younger sister lay on a wooden
chest, sound asleep, with her mouth wide open; but the boy, Lebedeff’s
son, had taken up his position close beside Colia and Hippolyte, his
face lit up with interest in the conversation of his father and the
rest, to which he would willingly have listened for ten hours at a
stretch.

“I have waited for you on purpose, and am very glad to see you arrive
so happy,” said Hippolyte, when the prince came forward to press his
hand, immediately after greeting Vera.

“And how do you know that I am ‘so happy’?”

“I can see it by your face! Say ‘how do you do’ to the others, and come
and sit down here, quick—I’ve been waiting for you!” he added,
accentuating the fact that he had waited. On the prince’s asking, “Will
it not be injurious to you to sit out so late?” he replied that he
could not believe that he had thought himself dying three days or so
ago, for he never had felt better than this evening.

Burdovsky next jumped up and explained that he had come in by accident,
having escorted Hippolyte from town. He murmured that he was glad he
had “written nonsense” in his letter, and then pressed the prince’s
hand warmly and sat down again.

The prince approached Evgenie Pavlovitch last of all. The latter
immediately took his arm.

“I have a couple of words to say to you,” he began, “and those on a
very important matter; let’s go aside for a minute or two.”

“Just a couple of words!” whispered another voice in the prince’s other
ear, and another hand took his other arm. Muishkin turned, and to his
great surprise observed a red, flushed face and a droll-looking figure
which he recognized at once as that of Ferdishenko. Goodness knows
where he had turned up from!

“Do you remember Ferdishenko?” he asked.

“Where have you dropped from?” cried the prince.

“He is sorry for his sins now, prince,” cried Keller. “He did not want
to let you know he was here; he was hidden over there in the
corner,—but he repents now, he feels his guilt.”

“Why, what has he done?”

“I met him outside and brought him in—he’s a gentleman who doesn’t
often allow his friends to see him, of late—but he’s sorry now.”

“Delighted, I’m sure!—I’ll come back directly, gentlemen,—sit down
there with the others, please,—excuse me one moment,” said the host,
getting away with difficulty in order to follow Evgenie.

“You are very gay here,” began the latter, “and I have had quite a
pleasant half-hour while I waited for you. Now then, my dear Lef
Nicolaievitch, this is what’s the matter. I’ve arranged it all with
Moloftsoff, and have just come in to relieve your mind on that score.
You need be under no apprehensions. He was very sensible, as he should
be, of course, for I think he was entirely to blame himself.”

“What Moloftsoff?”

“The young fellow whose arms you held, don’t you know? He was so wild
with you that he was going to send a friend to you tomorrow morning.”

“What nonsense!”

“Of course it is nonsense, and in nonsense it would have ended,
doubtless; but you know these fellows, they—”

“Excuse me, but I think you must have something else that you wished to
speak about, Evgenie Pavlovitch?”

“Of course, I have!” said the other, laughing. “You see, my dear
fellow, tomorrow, very early in the morning, I must be off to town
about this unfortunate business (my uncle, you know!). Just imagine, my
dear sir, it is all true—word for word—and, of course, everybody knew
it excepting myself. All this has been such a blow to me that I have
not managed to call in at the Epanchins’. Tomorrow I shall not see them
either, because I shall be in town. I may not be here for three days or
more; in a word, my affairs are a little out of gear. But though my
town business is, of course, most pressing, still I determined not to
go away until I had seen you, and had a clear understanding with you
upon certain points; and that without loss of time. I will wait now, if
you will allow me, until the company departs; I may just as well, for I
have nowhere else to go to, and I shall certainly not do any sleeping
tonight; I’m far too excited. And finally, I must confess that, though
I know it is bad form to pursue a man in this way, I have come to beg
your friendship, my dear prince. You are an unusual sort of a person;
you don’t lie at every step, as some men do; in fact, you don’t lie at
all, and there is a matter in which I need a true and sincere friend,
for I really may claim to be among the number of bona fide unfortunates
just now.”

He laughed again.

“But the trouble is,” said the prince, after a slight pause for
reflection, “that goodness only knows when this party will break up.
Hadn’t we better stroll into the park? I’ll excuse myself, there’s no
danger of their going away.”

“No, no! I have my reasons for wishing them not to suspect us of being
engaged in any specially important conversation. There are gentry
present who are a little too much interested in us. You are not aware
of that perhaps, prince? It will be a great deal better if they see
that we are friendly just in an ordinary way. They’ll all go in a
couple of hours, and then I’ll ask you to give me twenty minutes—half
an hour at most.”

“By all means! I assure you I am delighted—you need not have entered
into all these explanations. As for your remarks about friendship with
me—thanks, very much indeed. You must excuse my being a little absent
this evening. Do you know, I cannot somehow be attentive to anything
just now?”

“I see, I see,” said Evgenie, smiling gently. His mirth seemed very
near the surface this evening.

“What do you see?” said the prince, startled.

“I don’t want you to suspect that I have simply come here to deceive
you and pump information out of you!” said Evgenie, still smiling, and
without making any direct reply to the question.

“Oh, but I haven’t the slightest doubt that you did come to pump me,”
said the prince, laughing himself, at last; “and I dare say you are
quite prepared to deceive me too, so far as that goes. But what of
that? I’m not afraid of you; besides, you’ll hardly believe it, I feel
as though I really didn’t care a scrap one way or the other, just
now!—And—and—and as you are a capital fellow, I am convinced of that, I
dare say we really shall end by being good friends. I like you very
much Evgenie Pavlovitch; I consider you a very good fellow indeed.”

“Well, in any case, you are a most delightful man to have to deal with,
be the business what it may,” concluded Evgenie. “Come along now, I’ll
drink a glass to your health. I’m charmed to have entered into alliance
with you. By-the-by,” he added suddenly, “has this young Hippolyte come
down to stay with you?”

“Yes.”

“He’s not going to die at once, I should think, is he?”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been half an hour here with him, and he—”

Hippolyte had been waiting for the prince all this time, and had never
ceased looking at him and Evgenie Pavlovitch as they conversed in the
corner. He became much excited when they approached the table once
more. He was disturbed in his mind, it seemed; perspiration stood in
large drops on his forehead; in his gleaming eyes it was easy to read
impatience and agitation; his gaze wandered from face to face of those
present, and from object to object in the room, apparently without aim.
He had taken a part, and an animated one, in the noisy conversation of
the company; but his animation was clearly the outcome of fever. His
talk was almost incoherent; he would break off in the middle of a
sentence which he had begun with great interest, and forget what he had
been saying. The prince discovered to his dismay that Hippolyte had
been allowed to drink two large glasses of champagne; the one now
standing by him being the third. All this he found out afterwards; at
the moment he did not notice anything, very particularly.

“Do you know I am specially glad that today is your birthday!” cried
Hippolyte.

“Why?”

“You’ll soon see. D’you know I had a feeling that there would be a lot
of people here tonight? It’s not the first time that my presentiments
have been fulfilled. I wish I had known it was your birthday, I’d have
brought you a present—perhaps I have got a present for you! Who knows?
Ha, ha! How long is it now before daylight?”

“Not a couple of hours,” said Ptitsin, looking at his watch. “What’s
the good of daylight now? One can read all night in the open air
without it,” said someone.

“The good of it! Well, I want just to see a ray of the sun,” said
Hippolyte. “Can one drink to the sun’s health, do you think, prince?”

“Oh, I dare say one can; but you had better be calm and lie down,
Hippolyte—that’s much more important.”

“You are always preaching about resting; you are a regular nurse to me,
prince. As soon as the sun begins to ‘resound’ in the sky—what poet
said that? ‘The sun resounded in the sky.’ It is beautiful, though
there’s no sense in it!—then we will go to bed. Lebedeff, tell me, is
the sun the source of life? What does the source, or ‘spring,’ of life
really mean in the Apocalypse? You have heard of the ‘Star that is
called Wormwood,’ prince?”

“I have heard that Lebedeff explains it as the railroads that cover
Europe like a net.”

Everybody laughed, and Lebedeff got up abruptly.

“No! Allow me, that is not what we are discussing!” he cried, waving
his hand to impose silence. “Allow me! With these gentlemen... all
these gentlemen,” he added, suddenly addressing the prince, “on certain
points... that is...” He thumped the table repeatedly, and the laughter
increased. Lebedeff was in his usual evening condition, and had just
ended a long and scientific argument, which had left him excited and
irritable. On such occasions he was apt to evince a supreme contempt
for his opponents.

“It is not right! Half an hour ago, prince, it was agreed among us that
no one should interrupt, no one should laugh, that each person was to
express his thoughts freely; and then at the end, when everyone had
spoken, objections might be made, even by the atheists. We chose the
general as president. Now without some such rule and order, anyone
might be shouted down, even in the loftiest and most profound
thought....”

“Go on! Go on! Nobody is going to interrupt you!” cried several voices.

“Speak, but keep to the point!”

“What is this ‘star’?” asked another.

“I have no idea,” replied General Ivolgin, who presided with much
gravity.

“I love these arguments, prince,” said Keller, also more than half
intoxicated, moving restlessly in his chair. “Scientific and
political.” Then, turning suddenly towards Evgenie Pavlovitch, who was
seated near him: “Do you know, I simply adore reading the accounts of
the debates in the English parliament. Not that the discussions
themselves interest me; I am not a politician, you know; but it
delights me to see how they address each other ‘the noble lord who
agrees with me,’ ‘my honourable opponent who astonished Europe with his
proposal,’ ‘the noble viscount sitting opposite’—all these expressions,
all this parliamentarism of a free people, has an enormous attraction
for me. It fascinates me, prince. I have always been an artist in the
depths of my soul, I assure you, Evgenie Pavlovitch.”

“Do you mean to say,” cried Gania, from the other corner, “do you mean
to say that railways are accursed inventions, that they are a source of
ruin to humanity, a poison poured upon the earth to corrupt the springs
of life?”

Gavrila Ardalionovitch was in high spirits that evening, and it seemed
to the prince that his gaiety was mingled with triumph. Of course he
was only joking with Lebedeff, meaning to egg him on, but he grew
excited himself at the same time.

“Not the railways, oh dear, no!” replied Lebedeff, with a mixture of
violent anger and extreme enjoyment. “Considered alone, the railways
will not pollute the springs of life, but as a whole they are accursed.
The whole tendency of our latest centuries, in its scientific and
materialistic aspect, is most probably accursed.”

“Is it certainly accursed?... or do you only mean it might be? That is
an important point,” said Evgenie Pavlovitch.

“It is accursed, certainly accursed!” replied the clerk, vehemently.

“Don’t go so fast, Lebedeff; you are much milder in the morning,” said
Ptitsin, smiling.

“But, on the other hand, more frank in the evening! In the evening
sincere and frank,” repeated Lebedeff, earnestly. “More candid, more
exact, more honest, more honourable, and... although I may show you my
weak side, I challenge you all; you atheists, for instance! How are you
going to save the world? How find a straight road of progress, you men
of science, of industry, of cooperation, of trades unions, and all the
rest? How are you going to save it, I say? By what? By credit? What is
credit? To what will credit lead you?”

“You are too inquisitive,” remarked Evgenie Pavlovitch.

“Well, anyone who does not interest himself in questions such as this
is, in my opinion, a mere fashionable dummy.”

“But it will lead at least to solidarity, and balance of interests,”
said Ptitsin.

“You will reach that with nothing to help you but credit? Without
recourse to any moral principle, having for your foundation only
individual selfishness, and the satisfaction of material desires?
Universal peace, and the happiness of mankind as a whole, being the
result! Is it really so that I may understand you, sir?”

“But the universal necessity of living, of drinking, of eating—in
short, the whole scientific conviction that this necessity can only be
satisfied by universal co-operation and the solidarity of interests—is,
it seems to me, a strong enough idea to serve as a basis, so to speak,
and a ‘spring of life,’ for humanity in future centuries,” said Gavrila
Ardalionovitch, now thoroughly roused.

“The necessity of eating and drinking, that is to say, solely the
instinct of self-preservation...”

“Is not that enough? The instinct of self-preservation is the normal
law of humanity...”

“Who told you that?” broke in Evgenie Pavlovitch.

“It is a law, doubtless, but a law neither more nor less normal than
that of destruction, even self-destruction. Is it possible that the
whole normal law of humanity is contained in this sentiment of
self-preservation?”

“Ah!” cried Hippolyte, turning towards Evgenie Pavlovitch, and looking
at him with a queer sort of curiosity.

Then seeing that Radomski was laughing, he began to laugh himself,
nudged Colia, who was sitting beside him, with his elbow, and again
asked what time it was. He even pulled Colia’s silver watch out of his
hand, and looked at it eagerly. Then, as if he had forgotten
everything, he stretched himself out on the sofa, put his hands behind
his head, and looked up at the sky. After a minute or two he got up and
came back to the table to listen to Lebedeff’s outpourings, as the
latter passionately commentated on Evgenie Pavlovitch’s paradox.

“That is an artful and traitorous idea. A smart notion,” vociferated
the clerk, “thrown out as an apple of discord. But it is just. You are
a scoffer, a man of the world, a cavalry officer, and, though not
without brains, you do not realize how profound is your thought, nor
how true. Yes, the laws of self-preservation and of self-destruction
are equally powerful in this world. The devil will hold his empire over
humanity until a limit of time which is still unknown. You laugh? You
do not believe in the devil? Scepticism as to the devil is a French
idea, and it is also a frivolous idea. Do you know who the devil is? Do
you know his name? Although you don’t know his name you make a mockery
of his form, following the example of Voltaire. You sneer at his hoofs,
at his tail, at his horns—all of them the produce of your imagination!
In reality the devil is a great and terrible spirit, with neither
hoofs, nor tail, nor horns; it is you who have endowed him with these
attributes! But... he is not the question just now!”

“How do you know he is not the question now?” cried Hippolyte, laughing
hysterically.

“Another excellent idea, and worth considering!” replied Lebedeff.
“But, again, that is not the question. The question at this moment is
whether we have not weakened ‘the springs of life’ by the extension...”

“Of railways?” put in Colia eagerly.

“Not railways, properly speaking, presumptuous youth, but the general
tendency of which railways may be considered as the outward expression
and symbol. We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity!
‘The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!’ groans some solitary
thinker. ‘Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to
starving humanity is of more value than tranquillity of soul,’ replies
another triumphantly, and passes on with an air of pride. As for me, I
don’t believe in these waggons bringing bread to humanity. For, founded
on no moral principle, these may well, even in the act of carrying
bread to humanity, coldly exclude a considerable portion of humanity
from enjoying it; that has been seen more than once.”

“What, these waggons may coldly exclude?” repeated someone.

“That has been seen already,” continued Lebedeff, not deigning to
notice the interruption. “Malthus was a friend of humanity, but, with
ill-founded moral principles, the friend of humanity is the devourer of
humanity, without mentioning his pride; for, touch the vanity of one of
these numberless philanthropists, and to avenge his self-esteem, he
will be ready at once to set fire to the whole globe; and to tell the
truth, we are all more or less like that. I, perhaps, might be the
first to set a light to the fuel, and then run away. But, again, I must
repeat, that is not the question.”

“What is it then, for goodness’ sake?”

“He is boring us!”

“The question is connected with the following anecdote of past times;
for I am obliged to relate a story. In our times, and in our country,
which I hope you love as much as I do, for as far as I am concerned, I
am ready to shed the last drop of my blood...

“Go on! Go on!”

“In our dear country, as indeed in the whole of Europe, a famine visits
humanity about four times a century, as far as I can remember; once in
every twenty-five years. I won’t swear to this being the exact figure,
but anyhow they have become comparatively rare.”

“Comparatively to what?”

“To the twelfth century, and those immediately preceding and following
it. We are told by historians that widespread famines occurred in those
days every two or three years, and such was the condition of things
that men actually had recourse to cannibalism, in secret, of course.
One of these cannibals, who had reached a good age, declared of his own
free will that during the course of his long and miserable life he had
personally killed and eaten, in the most profound secrecy, sixty monks,
not to mention several children; the number of the latter he thought
was about six, an insignificant total when compared with the enormous
mass of ecclesiastics consumed by him. As to adults, laymen that is to
say, he had never touched them.”

The president joined in the general outcry.

“That’s impossible!” said he in an aggrieved tone. “I am often
discussing subjects of this nature with him, gentlemen, but for the
most part he talks nonsense enough to make one deaf: this story has no
pretence of being true.”

“General, remember the siege of Kars! And you, gentlemen, I assure you
my anecdote is the naked truth. I may remark that reality, although it
is governed by invariable law, has at times a resemblance to falsehood.
In fact, the truer a thing is the less true it sounds.”

“But could anyone possibly eat sixty monks?” objected the scoffing
listeners.

“It is quite clear that he did not eat them all at once, but in a space
of fifteen or twenty years: from that point of view the thing is
comprehensible and natural...”

“Natural?”

“And natural,” repeated Lebedeff with pedantic obstinacy. “Besides, a
Catholic monk is by nature excessively curious; it would be quite easy
therefore to entice him into a wood, or some secret place, on false
pretences, and there to deal with him as said. But I do not dispute in
the least that the number of persons consumed appears to denote a spice
of greediness.”

“It is perhaps true, gentlemen,” said the prince, quietly. He had been
listening in silence up to that moment without taking part in the
conversation, but laughing heartily with the others from time to time.
Evidently he was delighted to see that everybody was amused, that
everybody was talking at once, and even that everybody was drinking. It
seemed as if he were not intending to speak at all, when suddenly he
intervened in such a serious voice that everyone looked at him with
interest.

“It is true that there were frequent famines at that time, gentlemen. I
have often heard of them, though I do not know much history. But it
seems to me that it must have been so. When I was in Switzerland I used
to look with astonishment at the many ruins of feudal castles perched
on the top of steep and rocky heights, half a mile at least above
sea-level, so that to reach them one had to climb many miles of stony
tracks. A castle, as you know, is, a kind of mountain of stones—a
dreadful, almost an impossible, labour! Doubtless the builders were all
poor men, vassals, and had to pay heavy taxes, and to keep up the
priesthood. How, then, could they provide for themselves, and when had
they time to plough and sow their fields? The greater number must,
literally, have died of starvation. I have sometimes asked myself how
it was that these communities were not utterly swept off the face of
the earth, and how they could possibly survive. Lebedeff is not
mistaken, in my opinion, when he says that there were cannibals in
those days, perhaps in considerable numbers; but I do not understand
why he should have dragged in the monks, nor what he means by that.”

“It is undoubtedly because, in the twelfth century, monks were the only
people one could eat; they were the fat, among many lean,” said Gavrila
Ardalionovitch.

“A brilliant idea, and most true!” cried Lebedeff, “for he never even
touched the laity. Sixty monks, and not a single layman! It is a
terrible idea, but it is historic, it is statistic; it is indeed one of
those facts which enables an intelligent historian to reconstruct the
physiognomy of a special epoch, for it brings out this further point
with mathematical accuracy, that the clergy were in those days sixty
times richer and more flourishing than the rest of humanity and perhaps
sixty times fatter also...”

“You are exaggerating, you are exaggerating, Lebedeff!” cried his
hearers, amid laughter.

“I admit that it is an historic thought, but what is your conclusion?”
asked the prince.

He spoke so seriously in addressing Lebedeff, that his tone contrasted
quite comically with that of the others. They were very nearly laughing
at him, too, but he did not notice it.

“Don’t you see he is a lunatic, prince?” whispered Evgenie Pavlovitch
in his ear. “Someone told me just now that he is a bit touched on the
subject of lawyers, that he has a mania for making speeches and intends
to pass the examinations. I am expecting a splendid burlesque now.”

“My conclusion is vast,” replied Lebedeff, in a voice like thunder.
“Let us examine first the psychological and legal position of the
criminal. We see that in spite of the difficulty of finding other food,
the accused, or, as we may say, my client, has often during his
peculiar life exhibited signs of repentance, and of wishing to give up
this clerical diet. Incontrovertible facts prove this assertion. He has
eaten five or six children, a relatively insignificant number, no
doubt, but remarkable enough from another point of view. It is manifest
that, pricked by remorse—for my client is religious, in his way, and
has a conscience, as I shall prove later—and desiring to extenuate his
sin as far as possible, he has tried six times at least to substitute
lay nourishment for clerical. That this was merely an experiment we can
hardly doubt: for if it had been only a question of gastronomic
variety, six would have been too few; why only six? Why not thirty? But
if we regard it as an experiment, inspired by the fear of committing
new sacrilege, then this number six becomes intelligible. Six attempts
to calm his remorse, and the pricking of his conscience, would amply
suffice, for these attempts could scarcely have been happy ones. In my
humble opinion, a child is too small; I should say, not sufficient;
which would result in four or five times more lay children than monks
being required in a given time. The sin, lessened on the one hand,
would therefore be increased on the other, in quantity, not in quality.
Please understand, gentlemen, that in reasoning thus, I am taking the
point of view which might have been taken by a criminal of the middle
ages. As for myself, a man of the late nineteenth century, I, of
course, should reason differently; I say so plainly, and therefore you
need not jeer at me nor mock me, gentlemen. As for you, general, it is
still more unbecoming on your part. In the second place, and giving my
own personal opinion, a child’s flesh is not a satisfying diet; it is
too insipid, too sweet; and the criminal, in making these experiments,
could have satisfied neither his conscience nor his appetite. I am
about to conclude, gentlemen; and my conclusion contains a reply to one
of the most important questions of that day and of our own! This
criminal ended at last by denouncing himself to the clergy, and giving
himself up to justice. We cannot but ask, remembering the penal system
of that day, and the tortures that awaited him—the wheel, the stake,
the fire!—we cannot but ask, I repeat, what induced him to accuse
himself of this crime? Why did he not simply stop short at the number
sixty, and keep his secret until his last breath? Why could he not
simply leave the monks alone, and go into the desert to repent? Or why
not become a monk himself? That is where the puzzle comes in! There
must have been something stronger than the stake or the fire, or even
than the habits of twenty years! There must have been an idea more
powerful than all the calamities and sorrows of this world, famine or
torture, leprosy or plague—an idea which entered into the heart,
directed and enlarged the springs of life, and made even that hell
supportable to humanity! Show me a force, a power like that, in this
our century of vices and railways! I might say, perhaps, in our century
of steamboats and railways, but I repeat in our century of vices and
railways, because I am drunk but truthful! Show me a single idea which
unites men nowadays with half the strength that it had in those
centuries, and dare to maintain that the ‘springs of life’ have not
been polluted and weakened beneath this ‘star,’ beneath this network in
which men are entangled! Don’t talk to me about your prosperity, your
riches, the rarity of famine, the rapidity of the means of transport!
There is more of riches, but less of force. The idea uniting heart and
soul to heart and soul exists no more. All is loose, soft, limp—we are
all of us limp.... Enough, gentlemen! I have done. That is not the
question. No, the question is now, excellency, I believe, to sit down
to the banquet you are about to provide for us!”

Lebedeff had roused great indignation in some of his auditors (it
should be remarked that the bottles were constantly uncorked during his
speech); but this unexpected conclusion calmed even the most turbulent
spirits. “That’s how a clever barrister makes a good point!” said he,
when speaking of his peroration later on. The visitors began to laugh
and chatter once again; the committee left their seats, and stretched
their legs on the terrace. Keller alone was still disgusted with
Lebedeff and his speech; he turned from one to another, saying in a
loud voice:

“He attacks education, he boasts of the fanaticism of the twelfth
century, he makes absurd grimaces, and added to that he is by no means
the innocent he makes himself out to be. How did he get the money to
buy this house, allow me to ask?”

In another corner was the general, holding forth to a group of hearers,
among them Ptitsin, whom he had buttonholed. “I have known,” said he,
“a real interpreter of the Apocalypse, the late Gregory Semeonovitch
Burmistroff, and he—he pierced the heart like a fiery flash! He began
by putting on his spectacles, then he opened a large black book; his
white beard, and his two medals on his breast, recalling acts of
charity, all added to his impressiveness. He began in a stern voice,
and before him generals, hard men of the world, bowed down, and ladies
fell to the ground fainting. But this one here—he ends by announcing a
banquet! That is not the real thing!”

Ptitsin listened and smiled, then turned as if to get his hat; but if
he had intended to leave, he changed his mind. Before the others had
risen from the table, Gania had suddenly left off drinking, and pushed
away his glass, a dark shadow seemed to come over his face. When they
all rose, he went and sat down by Rogojin. It might have been believed
that quite friendly relations existed between them. Rogojin, who had
also seemed on the point of going away now sat motionless, his head
bent, seeming to have forgotten his intention. He had drunk no wine,
and appeared absorbed in reflection. From time to time he raised his
eyes, and examined everyone present; one might have imagined that he
was expecting something very important to himself, and that he had
decided to wait for it. The prince had taken two or three glasses of
champagne, and seemed cheerful. As he rose he noticed Evgenie
Pavlovitch, and, remembering the appointment he had made with him,
smiled pleasantly. Evgenie Pavlovitch made a sign with his head towards
Hippolyte, whom he was attentively watching. The invalid was fast
asleep, stretched out on the sofa.

“Tell me, prince, why on earth did this boy intrude himself upon you?”
he asked, with such annoyance and irritation in his voice that the
prince was quite surprised. “I wouldn’t mind laying odds that he is up
to some mischief.”

“I have observed,” said the prince, “that he seems to be an object of
very singular interest to you, Evgenie Pavlovitch. Why is it?”

“You may add that I have surely enough to think of, on my own account,
without him; and therefore it is all the more surprising that I cannot
tear my eyes and thoughts away from his detestable physiognomy.”

“Oh, come! He has a handsome face.”

“Why, look at him—look at him now!”

The prince glanced again at Evgenie Pavlovitch with considerable
surprise.