The prince paused to catch his breath. He was speaking terribly quickly. He was pale and breathless. Everyone exchanged glances; but at last the little old man laughed openly. Prince N. took out his lorgnette and studied the prince, not taking his eyes away. The German poeticule crept out of the corner and moved closer to the table, smiling a sinister smile.

"You greatly ex-ag-ge-rate," Ivan Petrovich drew out with some boredom and even as if embarrassed at something. "In their Church there are also representatives who are worthy of all respect and vir-tu-ous men . . ."

"I never spoke of individual representatives of the Church. I was speaking of Roman Catholicism in its essence, I was speaking of Rome. The Church cannot disappear entirely. I never said that!"

"Agreed, but this is all well known and even—unnecessary and . . . belongs to theology . . ."

"Oh, no, no! Not only to theology, I assure you! It concerns us much more closely than you think. That is our whole mistake, that we're still unable to see that this is not only an exclusively theological matter! For socialism is also a product of Catholicism and the Catholic essence! It, too, like its brother atheism, came from despair, opposing Catholicism in a moral sense, in order to replace the lost moral force of religion with itself, in order to quench the spiritual thirst of thirsting mankind and save it not through Christ, but also through violence! It is also freedom through violence, it is

also unity through blood and the sword! 'Do not dare to believe in God, do not dare to have property, do not dare to have personality, fraternité ou la mort* two million heads!'³⁴ You shall know them by their deeds,³³ it is said! And don't think that it's all so innocent and unthreatening for us; oh, we must respond, and swiftly, swiftly! Our Christ, whom we have preserved and they have never known, must shine forth as a response to the West! Not by being slavishly caught on the Jesuits' hook, but by bringing them our Russian civilization, we must now confront them, and let it not be said among us that their preaching is elegant, as someone just said ..."

"But excuse me, excuse me," Ivan Petrovich became terribly worried, looking around and even beginning to get frightened, "your thoughts are all, of course, praiseworthy and full of patriotism, but it's all exaggerated in the highest degree and . . . it's even better if we drop it . . ."

"No, it's not exaggerated, but rather understated; precisely understated, because I'm not able to express it, but. . ."

"Ex-cuse me!"

The prince fell silent. He was sitting upright on his chair and looking at Ivan Petrovich with fixed, burning eyes.

"It seems to me that you've been too greatly shocked by the incident with your benefactor," the little old man observed gently and without losing his equanimity. "You're inflamed . . . perhaps from solitude. If you live more with people, and I hope society will welcome you as a remarkable young man, your animation will, of course, subside, and you will see that it's all much simpler . . . and besides, such rare cases . . . come, in my view, partly from our satiety, and partly from . . . boredom . . ."

"Precisely, precisely so," the prince cried, "a splendid thought! Precisely 'from our boredom,' not from satiety, but, on the contrary, from thirst . . . not from satiety, there you're mistaken! Not only from thirst, but even from inflammation, from feverish thirst! And . . . and don't think it's all on such a small scale that one can simply laugh; forgive me, but one must be able to foresee! The Russian people, as soon as they reach the shore, as soon as they believe it's the shore, are so glad of it that they immediately go to the ultimate pillars.³⁶ Why is that? You marvel at Pavlishchev, you ascribe everything to his madness or to his kindness, but that's not so! And not only we but the whole of Europe marvels, on such occasions, at

*Brotherhood or death.

our Russian passion: if one of us embraces Catholicism, then he's bound to become a Jesuit, and of the most underground sort at that;³⁷ if he becomes an atheist, he is bound to start demanding the eradication of belief in God by force, which means by the sword! Why is that, why is there such frenzy all at once? You really don't know? Because he has found his fatherland, which he had missed here, and he rejoices; he has found the shore, the land, and he rushes to kiss it! It's not only from vainglory, not only from nasty, vainglorious feelings that Russian atheists and Russian Jesuits proceed, but from spiritual pain, spiritual thirst, from the longing for a lofty cause, a firm shore, a native land, in which we've ceased to believe because we've never known it! It's so easy for a Russian man to become an atheist, easier than for anyone else in the whole world! And our people don't simply become atheists, but they must believe in atheism, as in a new faith, without ever noticing that they are believing in a zero. Such is our thirst! 'Whoever has no ground under his feet also has no God.' That is not my phrase. It is the phrase of a merchant, an Old Believer,³⁸ I met on my travels. True, he didn't put it that way, he said: 'Whoever has renounced his native land, has also renounced his God.' Only think that some of our most educated people got themselves into flagellantism³⁹ . . . And in that case, incidentally, what makes flagellantism worse than nihilism, Jesuitism, atheism? It may even be a little more profound! But that is how far their anguish went! . . . Open to the thirsting and inflamed companions of Columbus the shores of the New World, open to the Russian man the Russian World, let him find the gold, the treasure, hidden from him in the ground! Show him the future renewal of all mankind and its resurrection, perhaps by Russian thought alone, by the Russian God and Christ, and you'll see what a mighty and righteous, wise and meek giant will rise up before the astonished world, astonished and frightened, because they expect nothing from us but the sword, the sword and violence, because, judging by themselves, they cannot imagine us without barbarism. And that is so to this day, and the more so the further it goes! And . . ."

But here an incident suddenly occurred, and the orator's speech was interrupted in the most unexpected way.

This whole feverish tirade, this whole flow of passionate and agitated words and ecstatic thoughts, as if thronging in some sort of turmoil and leaping over each other, all this foreboded something dangerous, something peculiar in the mood of the young man, who

had boiled up so suddenly for no apparent reason. Of those present in the drawing room, all who knew the prince marveled fearfully (and some also with shame) at his outburst, which so disagreed with his usual and even timid restraint, with the rare and particular tact he showed on certain occasions and his instinctive sense of higher propriety. They could not understand where it came from: the news about Pavlishchev could not have been the cause of it. In the ladies' corner they looked at him as at one gone mad, and Belokonsky later confessed that "another moment and she would have run for her life." The "little old men" were nearly at a loss from their initial amazement; the general-superior gazed, displeased and stern, from his chair. The engineer-colonel sat perfectly motionless. The little German even turned pale, but was still smiling his false smile, glancing at the others to see how they would react. However, all this and "the whole scandal" could have been resolved in the most ordinary and natural way, perhaps, even a minute later; Ivan Fyodorovich was extremely surprised but, having collected his thoughts sooner than the others, had already tried several times to stop the prince; failing in that, he was now making his way towards him with firm and resolute purposes. Another moment and, if it had really been necessary, he might have decided to take the prince out amicably, under the pretext of his illness, which might actually have been true and of which Ivan Fyodorovich was very much convinced in himself. . . But things turned out otherwise.