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"I... I..."
"I understand. Friends, drinking parties, club and cards, as usual— and the reputation of an atheist. I don't like this reputation, Stepan Trofimovich. I'd rather you weren't called an atheist, especially now. I've never liked it, in fact, because it's all just empty talk. It must finally be said."
"Mais, ma chère ..."
"Listen, Stepan Trofimovich, compared with you I am, of course, an ignoramus in all matters of learning, but on the way here I was thinking a lot about you. I've arrived at a conviction."
"And what is it?"
"It is that you and I alone are not smarter than everyone else in the world, but that some people are smarter than we are."
"Witty and apt. Some are smarter, meaning some are more right than we are, and therefore we, too, can be mistaken, isn't that so? Mais, ma bo
"What? What did you say?"
"I said: on trouve toujours plus de moines que de raison, and since I am in..."
"That can't be yours; you must have gotten it somewhere."
"Pascal said it."[42]
"Just as I thought ... it wasn't you! Why don't you ever say anything like that, so brief and so apt, instead of dragging it all out so? It's much better than what you said earlier about administrative rapture ..."
"Ma foi, chère[xxi] ... why? First, probably, because I'm not Pascal, after all, et puis... second, we Russians ca
"Hm. Perhaps that's not quite true. You ought at least to write down such words and remember them, you know, in the event of a conversation ... Ah, Stepan Trofimovich, on my way I thought of talking with you seriously, seriously!"
"Chère, chère amie!"
"Now that all these Lembkes, all these Karmazinovs... Oh, God, how you've gone to seed! Oh, how you torment me! ... I wished these people to feel respect for you, because they're not worth your finger, your little finger, and look how you carry yourself! What will they see? What am I going to show them? Instead of standing nobly as a witness, of continuing to be an example, you've surrounded yourself with some riffraff, you've acquired some impossible habits, you've grown decrepit, you ca
"But why my and why inseparable?"Stepan Trofimovich timidly protested.
"Where is he now?" Varvara Petrovna went on, sternly and sharply.
"He ... he has boundless respect for you, and has gone to S——k to collect his inheritance from his mother."
"Getting money seems to be the only thing he does. What about Shatov? Same as ever?"
"Irascible, mais bon.”
"I can't bear your Shatov; he's angry and thinks too much of himself!"
"How is Darya Pavlovna's health?"
"You mean Dasha? Why her all of a sudden?" Varvara Petrovna looked at him curiously. "She's well, I left her with the Drozdovs ... I heard something about your son in Switzerland, something bad, not good."
"Oh, c'est une histoire bien bête! Je vous attendais, ma bo
"Enough, Stepan Trofimovich, let me rest; I'm exhausted. We'll have time to talk our fill, especially about bad things. You're begi
Stepan Trofimovich "spared a person," but he withdrew in perplexity.
V
Our friend had indeed acquired not a few bad habits, especially of late. He had visibly and rapidly gone to seed, and it was true that he had become slovenly. He drank more, grew more tearful and nervous; became overly sensitive to refinement. His face acquired a strange ability to change remarkably quickly, for instance, from the most solemn expression to the most ridiculous and even silly. He could not endure solitude and constantly longed for someone to entertain him at once. He had an absolute need for gossip, for some local anecdote, and it had to be new each day. If no one came for a long time, he wandered dejectedly about his rooms, went up to the windows, pensively chewed his lips, sighed deeply, and finally all but whimpered. He kept having presentiments of something, being afraid of something unexpected, inevitable; he became timorous; began paying great attention to his dreams.
He spent that whole day and evening in extreme dejection, sent for me, was very agitated, talked for a long time, narrated for a long time, but it was all quite incoherent. Varvara Petrovna had long known that he concealed nothing from me. It seemed to me, finally, that he was concerned about something particular, something that he perhaps could not imagine to himself. As a rule, when we were alone together and he began complaining to me, a little bottle was almost always brought out after a while, and things would become more heartening. This time there was no wine, and he obviously suppressed in himself the recurring desire to send for it.
"Why is she so angry all the time!" he complained every moment, like a child. "Tous les hommes de génie et de progrès en Russie étaient, sont et seront toujours des card players et des drunkards qui boivent en zapoï[xxiii]... and I'm not such a card player and drunkard yet... She reproaches me, asks me why I don't write anything. Strange notion! ... And why am I lying down? You must stand 'as an example and a reproach,' she says. Mais, entre nous soit dit,[xxiv] what else can a man destined to be a standing 'reproach' do but lie down—doesn't she see that?"
And finally the main, the particular anguish that was then tormenting him so persistently became clear to me. Many times that evening he went up to the mirror and stood before it for a long while. Finally, he turned from the mirror to me and said with some strange despair:
"Mon cher, je suis un man gone to seed!"
Yes, indeed, until then, until that very day, he had always remained certain of just one thing—namely, that despite all Varvara Petrovna's "new views" and "changes of ideas," he still had charms over her woman's heart, that is, not only as an exile or as a famous scholar, but also as a handsome man. For twenty years this flattering and comforting conviction had been rooted in him, and of all his convictions it was perhaps the hardest to part with. Did he anticipate that evening what a colossal ordeal was being prepared for him in the nearest future?