"Hey, it'll burn up, and they'll shame you," Nastasya Filippovna cried to him, "you'll hang yourself afterwards, I'm not joking!"

The fire that had flared up in the beginning between the two smoldering logs went out at first, when the packet fell on it and smothered it. But a small blue flame still clung from below to one corner of the lower log. Finally, a long, thin tongue of fire licked at the packet, the fire caught and raced along the edges of the paper, and suddenly the whole packet blazed in the fireplace and the bright flame shot upwards. Everyone gasped.

"Dearest lady!" Lebedev kept screaming, straining forward once more, but Rogozhin dragged him back and pushed him aside again.

Rogozhin himself had turned into one fixed gaze. He could not turn it from Nastasya Filippovna, he was reveling, he was in seventh heaven.

"There's a queen for you!" he repeated every moment, turning around to whoever was there. "That's the way to do it!" he cried out, forgetting himself. "Who among you rogues would pull such a stunt, eh?"

The prince watched ruefully and silently.

"I'll snatch it out with my teeth for just one thousand!" Ferdyshchenko offered.

"I could do it with my teeth, too!" the fist gentleman, who was standing behind them all, rasped in a fit of decided despair. "D-devil take it! It's burning, it'll burn up!" he cried, seeing the flame.

"It's burning, it's burning!" they all cried in one voice, almost all of them also straining towards the fireplace.

"Ganya, stop faking, I tell you for the last time!"

"Go in!" Ferdyshchenko bellowed, rushing to Ganya in a decided frenzy and pulling him by the sleeve. "Go in, you little swaggerer! It'll burn up! Oh, cur-r-rse you!"

Ganya shoved Ferdyshchenko aside forcefully, turned, and went towards the door; but before going two steps, he reeled and crashed to the floor.

"He fainted!" they cried all around.

"Dearest lady, it'll burn up!" Lebedev screamed.

"Burn up for nothing!" the roaring came from all sides.

"Katya, Pasha, fetch him water, spirits!" Nastasya Filippovna cried, seized the fire tongs and snatched the packet out.

The outer paper was nearly all charred and smoldering, but it could be seen at once that the inside was not damaged. The packet

had been wrapped in three layers of newspaper, and the money was untouched. Everyone breathed more easily.

"Maybe just one little thousand is damaged a tiny bit, but the rest is untouched," Lebedev said tenderly.

"It's all his! The whole packet is his! Do you hear, gentlemen?" Nastasya Filippovna proclaimed, placing the packet beside Ganya. "He didn't go in after it, he held out! So his vanity is still greater than his lust for money. Never mind, he'll come to! Otherwise he might have killed me . . . There, he's already recovering. General, Ivan Petrovich, Darya Alexeevna, Katya, Pasha, Rogozhin, do you hear? The packet is his, Ganya's. I grant him full possession of it as a reward for . . . well, for whatever! Tell him that. Let it lie there beside him . . . Rogozhin, march! Farewell, Prince, I've seen a man for the first time! Farewell, Afanasy Ivanovich, merci!"

The whole of Rogozhin's crew, with noise, clatter, and shouting, raced through the rooms to the exit, following Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna. In the reception room the maids gave her her fur coat; the cook Marfa came running from the kitchen. Nastasya Filippovna kissed them all.

"Can it be, dearest lady, that you're leaving us for good? But where will you go? And on such a day, on your birthday!" the tearful maids asked, weeping and kissing her hands.

"I'll go to the street, Katya, you heard, that's the place for me, or else I'll become a washerwoman! Enough of Afanasy Ivanovich! Give him my regards, and don't think ill of me . . ."

The prince rushed headlong for the front gate, where they were all getting into four troikas with little bells. The general overtook him on the stairs.

"Good heavens, Prince, come to your senses!" he said, seizing him by the arm. "Drop it! You see what she's like! I'm speaking as a father . . ."

The prince looked at him, but, without saying a word, broke away and ran downstairs.

At the front gate, from which the troikas had just driven off, the general saw the prince catch the first cab and shout, "To Ekaterinhof, follow those troikas!" Then the general's little gray trotter pulled up and took the general home, along with his new hopes and calculations and the aforementioned pearls, which the general had all the same not forgotten to take with him. Amidst his calculations there also flashed once or twice the seductive image of Nastasya Filippovna; the general sighed:

"A pity! A real pity! A lost woman! A madwoman! . . . Well, sir, but what the prince needs now is not Nastasya Filippovna . . ."

A few moralizing and admonishing words of the same sort were also uttered by two other interlocutors from among Nastasya Filippovna's guests, who had decided to go a little way on foot.

"You know, Afanasy Ivanovich, they say something of the sort exists among the Japanese," Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn was saying. "An offended man there supposedly goes to the offender and says to him: 'You have offended me, for that I have come to rip my belly open before your eyes,' and with those words he actually rips his belly open before his offender's eyes, no doubt feeling an extreme satisfaction, as if he had indeed revenged himself. There are strange characters in the world, Afanasy Ivanovich!"

"And you think it was something of that sort here, too?" replied Afanasy Ivanovich with a smile. "Hm! Anyhow, you've wittily . . . and the comparison is excellent. You saw for yourself, however, my dearest Ivan Petrovich, that I did all I could; I cannot do the impossible, wouldn't you agree? You must also agree, however, that there are some capital virtues in this woman . . . brilliant features. I even wanted to cry out to her just now, if only I could have allowed myself to do it in that bedlam, that she herself was my best defense against all her accusations. Well, who wouldn't be captivated by this woman on occasion to the point of forgetting all reason . . . and the rest? Look, that boor Rogozhin came lugging a hundred thousand to her! Let's say everything that happened there tonight was ephemeral, romantic, indecent, but, on the other hand, it was colorful, it was original, you must agree. God, what might have come from such a character and with such beauty! But, despite all my efforts, even education—all is lost! A diamond in the rough—I've said it many times . . ."

And Afanasy Ivanovich sighed deeply.

PART TWO

I

A couple of days after the strange adventure at Nastasya Filippovna's party, with which we ended the first part of our story, Prince Myshkin hastened to leave for Moscow on the business of receiving his unexpected inheritance. It was said then that there might have been other reasons for such a hasty departure; but of that, as well as of the prince's adventures in Moscow and generally in the course of his absence from Petersburg, we can supply very little information. The prince was away for exactly six months, and even those who had certain reasons to be interested in his fate could find out very little about him during all that time. True, some sort of rumors reached some of them, though very rarely, but these were mostly strange and almost always contradicted each other. The greatest interest in the prince was shown, of course, in the house of the Epanchins, to whom he had even had no time to say good-bye as he was leaving. The general, however, had seen him then, even two or three times; they had discussed something seriously. But if Epanchin himself had seen him, he had not informed his family of it. And, generally, at first, that is, for nearly a whole month after the prince's departure, talk of him was avoided in the Epanchins' house. Only the general's wife, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, voiced her opinion at the very beginning, "that she had been sadly mistaken about the prince." Then after two or three days she added, though without mentioning the prince now, but vaguely, that "the chiefest feature of her life was to be constantly mistaken about people." And finally, ten days later, being vexed with her daughters over something, she concluded with the utterance: "Enough mistakes! There will be no more of them!" We cannot help noting here that for a long time a certain unpleasant mood existed in their house. There was something heavy, strained, unspoken, quarrelsome; everyone scowled. The general was busy day and night, taken up with his affairs; rarely had anyone seen him so busy and active—especially with official work. The family hardly managed to catch a glimpse of him. As for the Epanchin girls, they, of course, said nothing openly. It may