Текст книги "Demons"
Автор книги: Федор Достоевский
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"What's this now? Is it pancakes? Mais... c'est charmant.”
"Do you wish some, mister?" the mistress offered at once and politely.
"I do, I precisely wish some, and ... I'd also like to ask you for tea," Stepan Trofimovich perked up.
"Start the samovar? With the greatest pleasure."
On a big plate with a bold blue pattern, pancakes appeared—those well-known peasant pancakes, thin, half wheat, with hot fresh butter poured over them—most delicious pancakes. Stepan Trofimovich sampled them with delight.
"How rich and how delicious they are! If only one could have un doigt d'eau de vie." [clxxi]
"You wish a little vodka, mister?"
"Precisely, precisely, just a bit, un tout petit rien," [clxxii]
"Five kopecks' worth, you mean?"
"Five kopecks' worth—five—five—five, un tout petit rien," Stepan Trofimovich yessed her with a blissful little smile.
Ask a peasant to do something for you, and, if he can and wants to, he will serve you diligently and cordially; but ask him to fetch a little vodka—and his usual calm cordiality suddenly transforms into a sort of hasty, joyful obligingness, almost a family solicitude for you. Someone going to get vodka—though only you are going to drink it, not he, and he knows it beforehand—feels all the same, as it were, some part of your future gratification ... In no more than three or four minutes (the pot-house was two steps away), there stood on the table before Stepan Trofimovich a half-pint bottle and a large greenish glass.
"And all that for me!" he was greatly surprised. "I've always had vodka, but I never knew five kopecks' worth was so much."
He poured a glass, rose, and with a certain solemnity crossed the room to the other corner, where his companion on the sack had settled herself—the black-browed wench who had so pestered him with her questions on the way. The wench was abashed and started making excuses, but, having uttered all that decency prescribed, in the end she rose, drank politely, in three sips, as women do, and with a show of great suffering on her face handed the glass back and bowed to Stepan Trofimovich. He pompously returned her bow and went back to his table even with a look of pride.
All this happened in him by some sort of inspiration: he himself had not known even a second before that he would go and treat the wench.
"My knowledge of how to handle the people is perfect, perfect, I always told them so," he thought smugly, pouring himself the remaining drink from the bottle; though it turned out to be less than a glass, the drink produced a vivifying warmth and even went to his head a little.
"Je suis malade tout à fait, mais ce n'est pas trop mauvais d'être malade." [clxxiii]
"Would you like to buy?" a woman's soft voice came from beside him.
He looked up and, to his surprise, saw before him a lady– une dame et elle en avait l'air [clxxiv] —now past thirty, with a very modest look, dressed town-fashion in a dark dress, and with a big gray kerchief on her shoulders. There was something very affable in her face, which Stepan Trofimovich immediately liked. She had just come back to the cottage, where she had left her things on a bench next to the place Stepan Trofimovich had taken—among them a briefcase at which, he remembered, he had glanced curiously as he entered, and a not very large oilcloth bag. From this same bag she took two handsomely bound books with crosses stamped on the covers and brought them to Stepan Trofimovich.
"Eh... mais je crois que c'est l'Évangile; [clxxv] with the greatest pleasure... Ah, I understand now... Vous êtes ce qu 'on appellea book-hawker; [clxxvi]I've read of it more than once... Fifty kopecks?"
"Thirty-five kopecks each," the book-hawker answered.
"With the greatest pleasure. Je n 'ai rien contre l'Évangile, et [clxxvii] ....I've long wanted to reread ..."
It flitted through him at that moment that he had not read the Gospel for at least thirty years, and had merely recalled a bit of it perhaps seven years ago only from reading Renan's book, La Vie de Jésus. [199] As he had no change, he pulled out his four ten-rouble bills—all he had. The mistress undertook to break one, and only now did he take a better look and notice that a good many people had gathered in the cottage and had all been watching him for some time and seemed to be talking about him. They also discussed the fire in town, the owner of the cart with the cow most of all, since he had just come from there. They were talking about arson, about the Shpigulin men.
"He never said a word to me about the fire while he was driving me, and yet he talked about everything," it somehow occurred to Stepan Trofimovich.
"Good sir, Stepan Trofimovich, is it you I see? I really never dreamed! ... Don't you recognize me?" exclaimed an elderly fellow, an old-time household serf by the looks, with a shaven beard and wearing a greatcoat with long, turned-back lapels.
Stepan Trofimovich was frightened at hearing his own name.
"Excuse me," he muttered, "I don't quite remember you..."
"No recollection! But I'm Anisim, Anisim Ivanov. I served the late Mr. Gaganov, and saw you, sir, many a time with Varvara Petrovna at the late Avdotya Sergevna's. I used to come to you from her with books, and twice brought Petersburg candy she sent to you..."
"Ah, yes, I remember you, Anisim," Stepan Trofimovich smiled. "So you live here?"
"Near Spasov, sir, by the V– monastery, on Marfa Sergevna's estate, that's Avdotya Sergevna's sister, you may be pleased to remember her, she broke her leg jumping out of a carriage on her way to a ball. She now lives near the monastery, and me with her, sir; and now, if you please, I'm on my way to the provincial capital, to visit my family..."
"Ah, yes, yes."
"I saw you and it made me glad, you were ever kind to me, sir," Anisim was smiling rapturously. "And where is it you're going like this, sir, it seems you're all alone... Seems you never used to go out alone, sir?"
Stepan Trofimovich looked at him timorously.
"It mightn't be to our Spasov, sir?" "Yes, to Spasov. Il me semble que tout le monde va à Spassof . .." [clxxviii]
"It mightn't be to Fyodor Matveevich's? Won't he be glad of you. He had such respect for you in the old days; even now he often remembers you..."
"Yes, yes, to Fyodor Matveevich's."
"Must be so, sir, must be so. You've got the peasants here marveling; they let on, sir, that they supposedly met you on foot on the high road. Foolish folk, sir."
"I... It's... You know, Anisim, I made a wager, as Englishmen do, that I could get there on foot, and I..."
Sweat stood out on his forehead and temples.
"Must be so, sir, must be so..." Anisim listened with merciless curiosity. But Stepan Trofimovich could not bear it any longer. He was so abashed that he wanted to get up and leave the cottage. But the samovar was brought in, and at the same moment the book-hawker, who had stepped out somewhere, came back. He turned to her with the gesture of a man saving his own life, and offered her tea. Anisim yielded and walked away.
Indeed, perplexity had been emerging among the peasants.
"Who is this man? Found walking down the road, says he's a teacher, dressed like a foreigner, reasons like a little child, answers nonsensically, as if he'd run away from somebody, and he's got money!" There was beginning to be some thought of reporting to the authorities—"since anyway things are not so quiet in town." But Anisim settled it all that same minute. Stepping out to the front hall, he told everyone who cared to listen that Stepan Trofimovich was not really a teacher, but was "himself a great scholar and occupied with great studies, and was a local landowner himself and had lived for the past twenty-two years with the full general's widow Stavrogin, in place of the chiefest man in the house, and had great respect from everyone in town. He used to leave fifty or a hundred roubles of an evening in the gentlemen's club, and in rank he was a councillor, which is the same as a lieutenant colonel in the army, just one step lower than full colonel. And that he's got money is because through the full general's widow Stavrogin he has more money than you could count," and so on and so forth.
"Mais c'est une dame, et très comme il faut," [clxxix]Stepan Trofimovich was resting from Anisim's attack, observing with pleasant curiosity his neighbor, the book-hawker, who, however, was drinking her tea from the saucer with sugar on the side. [200] "Ce petit morceau de sucre ce n'est rien [clxxx] ... There is in her something noble and independent and at the same time—quiet. Le comme il faut tout pur, [clxxxi] only of a somewhat different sort."
He soon learned from her that she was Sofya Matveevna Ulitin, and actually lived in –, where she had a widowed sister, a tradeswoman; she herself was also a widow, and her husband, a sublieutenant who had risen to that rank from sergeant major, had been killed at Sebastopol. [201]
"But you're so young, vous n'avez pas trente ans." [clxxxii]
"Thirty-four, sir," Sofya Matveevna smiled.
"So, you also understand French?"
"A little, sir; I lived in a noble house for four years after that and picked it up from the children there."
She told him that being left after her husband at the age of eighteen, she had stayed for a while in Sebastopol "as a sister of mercy," and had then lived in various places, sir, and now here she was going around selling the Gospel.
"Mais mon Dieu,it wasn't you who were involved in that strange, even very strange, story in our town?"
She blushed; it turned out to have been she.
" Ces vauriens, ces malheureux! [clxxxiii] . .." he tried to begin, in a voice trembling with indignation; a painful and hateful recollection echoed tormentingly in his heart. For a moment he became as if oblivious.
"Hah, she's gone again," he suddenly came to himself, noticing that she was no longer beside him. "She steps out frequently and is preoccupied with something, I notice she's even worried... Bah, je deviens égoïste .. ." [clxxxiv]
He looked up and again saw Anisim, this time in the most threatening circumstances. The whole cottage was filled with peasants, all apparently dragged there by Anisim. The proprietor was there, and the peasant with the cow, and another two peasants (they turned out to be coachmen), and some other half-drunk little man, dressed like a peasant but clean-shaven, who resembled a besotted tradesman and was talking more than anyone else. And they were all discussing him, Stepan Trofimovich. The peasant with the cow stood his ground, insisting that along the shore would be about a thirty-mile detour, and that it had to be by steamer-boat. The half-drunk tradesman and the proprietor hotly objected:
"Because, dear brother, if it's by steamer-boat, of course, His Excellency will have a closer way across the lake; that's right enough; except the way things are now, the steamer-boat may not even go."
"It will, it will, it'll go for another week," Anisim was the most excited of all.
"Maybe so! but it doesn't come on schedule, because it's late in the year, and sometimes they wait three days in Ustyevo."
"It'll come tomorrow, tomorrow at two o'clock it'll come on schedule. You'll get to Spasov still before evening, sir, right on schedule," Anisim was turning himself inside out.
"Mais qu 'est-ce qu 'il a, cet homme," [clxxxv]Stepan Trofimovich trembled, fearfully awaiting his fate.
The coachmen, too, stepped up and began bargaining; they were asking three roubles to Ustyevo. Others shouted that he wouldn't be doing badly, that it was the right price, just the same price they charged all summer for going from here to Ustyevo.
"But... it's also nice here... And I don't want to," Stepan Trofimovich started mumbling.
"Right, sir, it's just as you say, right now it's really nice in Spasov, and you'll make Fyodor Matveevich so glad."
"Mon Dieu, mes amis,all this is so unexpected for me."
At last Sofya Matveevna came back. But she sat on the bench quite crushed and sad.
"I'm not to be in Spasov!" she said to the mistress.
"What, you're going to Spasov, too?" Stepan Trofimovich roused himself.
It turned out that a certain landowner, Nadezhda Yegorovna Svetlitsyn, had told her the day before to wait for her in Khatovo and promised to take her to Spasov, and here she had not come.
"What am I to do now?" Sofya Matveevna kept repeating.
"Mais, ma chère et nouvelle amie, [clxxxvi] I, too, can take you, as well as any landowner, to this, what is it called, this village I've hired a coach to, and tomorrow—well, tomorrow we'll go to Spasov together."
"But, are you also going to Spasov?"
"Mais que faire, et je suis enchanté! [clxxxvii] I shall be extremely glad to take you there; they want to, I've already hired... Which of you did I hire?" Stepan Trofimovich suddenly wanted terribly much to go to Spasov.
A quarter of an hour later they were already getting into the covered britzka: he very animated and thoroughly pleased; she with her bag and a grateful smile beside him. Anisim helped them in.
"Have a good trip, sir," he was bustling with all his might around the britzka, "it was such gladness you caused us!" "Good-bye, good-bye, my friend, good-bye." "When you see Fyodor Matveevich, sir..." "Yes, my friend, yes ... Fyodor Petrovich ... and now good-bye."
II
You see, my friend—you will allow me to call you my friend, n'est-ce pas?" [clxxxviii] Stepan Trofimovich began hastily, as soon as the britzka started. "You see, I... J'aime le peuple, c'est indispensable, mais il me semble que je ne l'avais jamais vu de près. Stasie... cela va sans dire qu 'elle est aussi du peuple... mais le vrai peuple, [clxxxix] that is, the real ones, the ones on the high road, it seems to me, care only about where I'm actually going... But let's drop our grudges. It's as if I were straying a little, but that, it seems, is from haste."
"It seems you're unwell, sir," Sofya Matveevna was studying him keenly but respectfully.
"No, no, I just need to wrap myself up, and generally the wind is somehow fresh, even very fresh, but we'll forget that. I mainly wished to say something else. Chère et incomparable amie, [cxc] it seems to me that I am almost happy, and the one to blame for it is—you. Happiness is unprofitable for me, because I immediately set about forgiving all my enemies ..."
"But that is very good, sir."
"Not always, chère innocente. L'Evangile... Voyez-vous, désormais nous le prêcherons ensemble, [cxci] and I'll willingly sell your handsome books. Yes, I feel there's perhaps an idea there, quelque chose de très nouveau dans ce genre. [cxcii] The people are religious, c 'est admis, [cxciii] but they still don't know the Gospel. I will expound it to them ... In expounding it orally, it is possible to correct the mistakes of this remarkable book, which I, of course, am prepared to treat with great respect. I'll also be useful on the high road. I've always been useful, I've always said so to themand to cette chère ingrate [cxciv] ...Oh, let's forgive, forgive, let's first of all forgive all and always... Let's hope that we, too, will be forgiven. Yes, because we are guilty one and all before each other. All are guilty! ..."
"That, I think, you said very well, if you please, sir."
"Yes, yes ... I feel that I am speaking very well. I will speak very well to them, but, but what was the main thing I wished to say? I keep getting confused and don't remember... Will you allow me not to part from you? I feel that your eyes and... I'm even surprised at your manners: you're simplehearted, and you say 'sir,' and you put the cup upside down on the saucer... with that ugly little sugar lump; but there's something lovely in you, and I can see by your features... Oh, don't blush, and don't be afraid of me as a man. Chère et incomparable, pour moi une femme c'est tout. [cxcv] I cannot live without a woman near, but simply near... I'm terribly, terribly confused ... I simply cannot remember what I wished to say. Oh, blessed is he to whom God always sends a woman, and... and I even think I'm in some sort of ecstasy. And on the high road, too, there is a lofty thought! there—that is what I wished to say—about the thought, now I've remembered it, and I kept missing it before. But why did they take us farther on? It was nice there, too, and here– cela devient trop froid. A propos, j'ai en tout quarante roubles et voilà cet argent, [cxcvi] take it, take it, I don't know how, I'll lose it, they'll take it from me, and ... It seems to me I want to sleep; something is spinning in my head. Just spinning, spinning, spinning. Oh, how kind you are, what's that you're covering me with?"
"You must be in a real fever, sir, and I've covered you with my blanket, only about the money, sir, I'd..."
"Oh, for God's sake, n 'en parlons plus, parce que cela me fait mal, [cxcvii] oh, how kind you are!"
He somehow quickly interrupted his speaking and fell asleep extremely soon, in a feverish, shivering sleep. The country road they drove on for those ten miles was not a smooth one, and the carriage jolted cruelly. Stepan Trofimovich woke up frequently, raised himself quickly from the small pillow Sofya Matveevna had slipped under his head, seized her hand, and asked: "Are you here?"—as if he feared she might leave him. He also insisted that he had seen some gaping jaws with teeth in a dream and had found it very repulsive. Sofya Matveevna was greatly worried for him.
The coachman drove them straight up to a big cottage with four windows and wings of rooms in the yard. The awakened Stepan Trofimovich hurriedly walked in and went straight to the second room, the best and most spacious in the house. His sleepy face acquired a most bustling expression. He explained at once to the mistress, a tall and sturdy woman of about forty with very black hair and all but a moustache, that he required the whole room for himself "and that the door be shut and no one be let in, parce que nous avons à parler." [cxcviii]
" Oui, j'ai beaucoup à vous dire, chère amie, [cxcix] I'll pay you, I'll pay you!" he waved the mistress away.
Though he was hurrying, he moved his tongue somehow stiffly. The mistress listened with displeasure, but in token of agreement kept her silence, in which, however, one could sense a certain menace. He noticed none of this and hurriedly (he was in a terrible hurry) requested that she go and serve dinner at once as soon as possible, "without the least delay."
Here the woman with the moustache could bear it no longer.
"This isn't an inn, mister, we don't serve dinners for travelers. Some boiled crayfish or a samovar, we have nothing else. There won't be fresh fish till tomorrow."
But Stepan Trofimovich began waving his arms, repeating with wrathful impatience: "I'll pay, only be quick, be quick." They settled on fish soup and roast chicken; the landlady declared that there was not a chicken to be found in the whole village; however, she agreed to go and look, but with an air as though she were doing an extraordinary favor.
As soon as she left, Stepan Trofimovich instantly sat down on the sofa and sat Sofya Matveevna down next to him. There were both armchairs and a sofa in the room, but of dreadful appearance. Generally, the whole room, rather spacious (with a partition behind which stood a bed), with its yellow, old, torn wallpaper, with dreadful mythological lithographs on the walls, with a long row of icons and bronze triptychs [202]in the front corner, with its strange assortment of furniture, presented an unsightly mixture of the urban and the aboriginally peasant. But he did not even glance at it all, did not even look out the window at the vast lake which began about seventy feet from the cottage.
"At last we're by ourselves, and we won't let anyone in! I want to tell you everything, everything, from the very beginning."
Sofya Matveevna stopped him, even with strong uneasiness:
"Is it known to you, Stepan Trofimovich..."
"Comment, vous savez déjà mon nom?" [cc] he smiled joyfully.
"I heard it today from Anisim Ivanovich, when you were talking with him. But this, for my part, I will be so bold as to tell you..."
And in a quick whisper, glancing back at the closed door to be sure no one was eavesdropping, she told him that here, in this village, there is trouble, sir. That all the local peasants, though fishermen, in fact make a business of charging summer visitors whatever price they like. The village is not on a main route, but is out of the way, and the only reason to come here is that the steamer stops here, but when the steamer does not come, as always happens the moment the weather turns bad, there will be a crowd of people waiting for several days, and then all the houses in the village will be occupied, and that is just what the owners wait for; because they triple the price for everything, and the proprietor here is proud and haughty, because he is very rich for these parts—his net alone is worth a thousand roubles.
Stepan Trofimovich looked into Sofya Matveevna's extremely animated face all but with reproach, and several times made a gesture to stop her. But she held her own and finished: according to what she said, she had already come there in the summer with one "very noble lady, sir," from town, and had also stayed overnight waiting for the steamer to come, even two whole days, sir, and had suffered such grief that it was terrible to remember. "Now you, Stepan Trofimovich, were pleased to ask for this room for yourself alone, sir... It's just to warn you, sir... There, in the other room, there are already guests, an elderly man, a young man, and also some lady with children, and by tomorrow before two o'clock there'll be a houseful, because if there hasn't been a steamer for two days, it will surely come tomorrow. So for a separate room, and for having just asked for dinner, sir, and for making it bad for the other guests, they'll demand so much from you that it's even unheard-of in the capitals, sir..."
But he was suffering, truly suffering:
"Assez, mon enfant,I pray you; nous avons notre argent, et après– et après le bon Dieu.And I'm even surprised that you, with the loftiness of your notions... Assez, assez, vous me tourmentez," [cci]he said hysterically, "our whole future is ahead of us, and you... you make me fear for the future ..."
He immediately began telling the whole story, hurrying so much that at first it was even hard to understand. It took a long time. The fish soup was served, the chicken was served, the samovar, finally, was served, and he went on talking... What came out was somewhat strange and morbid, but he was indeed ill. This was a sudden straining of his mental powers, which, of course—and Sofya Matveevna foresaw it with anguish throughout his story—could not but lead immediately afterwards to a great loss of strength in his already unsettled organism. He started almost from childhood, when "with fresh breast he ran over the fields"; only an hour later did he reach his two marriages and Berlin life. I would not dream of laughing, however. There was something truly lofty for him here and, to use the newest language, almost a struggle for existence. He saw before him her whom he had already pre-elected for his future path, and he was hastening to initiate her, so to speak. His genius must no longer remain a secret to her... Perhaps he was greatly exaggerating with regard to Sofya Matveevna, but he had already elected her. He could not be without a woman. He himself saw clearly from her face that she hardly understood him at all, even in the most capital things.
"Ce n 'est rien, nous attendrons, [ccii] and meanwhile she can understand by intuition..."
"My friend, all I need is your heart alone!" he kept exclaiming, interrupting his narrative, "and this dear, charming look with which you are gazing at me now. Oh, do not blush! I've already told you..."
The fogginess increased greatly for poor, trapped Sofya Matveevna when the story turned almost into a whole dissertation on the subject of how no one had ever been able to understand Stepan Trofimovich and of how "talents perish in our Russia." It was "all so very intelligent," she later reported dejectedly. She listened with obvious suffering, her eyes slightly popping out. And when Stepan Trofimovich threw himself into humor and the wittiest barbs concerning our "progressive and dominating ones," she made an attempt, from grief, to smile a couple of times in response to his laughter, but it came out worse than tears, so that in the end Stepan Trofimovich himself became abashed and struck out with even greater passion and spite at the nihilists and "new people." Here he simply frightened her, and she only got a bit of respite, though a most deceptive one, when the romance proper began. A woman is always a woman, be she even a nun. She smiled, shook her head, blushed deeply all at once and lowered her eyes, thereby sending Stepan Trofimovich into utter admiration and inspiration, so that he even added quite a lot. His Varvara Petrovna came out as a most lovely brunette ("the admiration of Petersburg and a great many European capitals"), and her husband had died, "cut down by a bullet at Sebastopol," solely because he felt unworthy of her love, giving way to his rival—that is, to the same Stepan Trofimovich... "Do not be embarrassed, my quiet one, my Christian!" he exclaimed to Sofya Matveevna, himself almost believing everything he was telling her. "This was something lofty, something so fine that not even once in our lives did we declare it." The reason for such a state of affairs turned out in the ensuing narrative to be a blonde (if not Darya Pavlovna, I really don't know whom Stepan Trofimovich meant). This blonde owed everything to the brunette and, being a distant relation, had grown up in her house. The brunette, having finally noticed the blonde's love for Stepan Trofimovich, withdrew into herself. The blonde, for her part, noticing the brunette's love for Stepan Trofimovich, also withdrew into herself. And so all three of them, languishing in mutual magnanimity, were silent like this for twenty years, withdrawn into themselves. "Oh, what a passion it was, oh, what a passion!" he kept exclaiming, gasping in the most genuine rapture. "I saw the full blossom of her (the brunette's) beauty; daily 'with a sprain in my heart' I saw her passing by me, as if ashamed of her loveliness." (Once he said: "ashamed of her portliness.") At last, he had run away, abandoning all this feverish twenty-year dream. "Vingt ans!"And now, on the high road... Then, in some sort of inflammation of the brain, he began explaining to Sofya Matveevna what must be the significance of their meeting that day, "so accidentally and so fatefully, unto ages of ages." Sofya Matveevna, in terrible embarrassment, finally got up from the sofa; he even made an attempt to go on his knees before her, at which she burst into tears. Twilight was gathering; the two had already spent several hours in the closed room...
"No, you'd better let me go to the other room, sir," she murmured, "or else people might think something."
She finally tore herself away; he let her go, giving his word that he would go to bed at once. As he was saying good night, he complained of a bad headache. Sofya Matveevna had left her bag and things in the first room when she came in, intending to spend the night with the proprietors; but she did not manage to get any rest.
During the night, Stepan Trofimovich had an attack of that cholerine so well known to me and to all his friends—the usual outcome with him of any nervous strain or moral shock. Poor Sofya Matveevna did not sleep all night. Since, in tending to the sick man, she had to go in and out of the cottage fairly often through the proprietors' room, the guests and the mistress who were sleeping there kept grumbling and finally even began to curse when she decided towards morning to start the samovar. Stepan Trofimovich was half oblivious throughout the attack; at times he as if fancied that the samovar was being prepared, that he was being given something to drink (raspberry tea), that something warm was being put on his stomach, his chest. But he felt almost every moment that shewas there by him; that it was she coming and going getting him out of bed and putting him back in. By three o'clock in the morning he felt better; he sat up, lowered his legs from the bed, and, not thinking of anything, collapsed on the floor in front of her. This was no longer the former kneeling; he simply fell at her feet and kissed the hem of her dress...
"You mustn't, sir, I'm not worthy at all," she murmured, trying to lift him back into bed.
"My savior," he clasped his hands reverently before her. "Vous êtes noble comme une marquise! [cciii] I—I am a blackguard! Oh, I have been dishonest all my life ..."
"Calm yourself," Sofya Matveevna pleaded.
"What I told you earlier was all lies—for glory, for magnificence, out of idleness—all, all, to the last word, oh, blackguard, blackguard!"
The cholerine thus turned into another attack, one of hysterical self-condemnation. I have already mentioned these attacks in speaking of his letters to Varvara Petrovna. He suddenly remembered Lise,their meeting the previous morning: "It was so terrible and—there must have been some misfortune, and I didn't ask, I didn't find out! I thought only of myself! Oh, what happened to her, do you know what happened to her?" he besought Sofya Matveevna.
Then he swore that he "would not betray," that he would return to her(that is, to Varvara Petrovna). "We shall go up to her porch" (all this, that is, with Sofya Matveevna) "every day, as she's getting into her carriage to go for a morning promenade, and secretly watch... Oh, I wish her to strike me on the other cheek; it delights me to wish it! I'll turn my other cheek to her comme dans votre livre! [cciv] Now, only now do I understand what it means to... offer the other cheek. [203]I never understood before!"
