do you mean?’
‘It was just a minute before the execution,’ began the
prince, readily, carried away by the recollection and
evidently forgetting everything else in a moment; ‘just at
the instant when he stepped off the ladder on to the
scaffold. He happened to look in my direction: I saw his
eyes and understood all, at once—but how am I to
describe it? I do so wish you or somebody else could draw
it, you, if possible. I thought at the time what a picture it
would make. You must imagine all that went before, of
course, all—all. He had lived in the prison for some time
and had not expected that the execution would take place
for at least a week yet—he had counted on all the
formalities and so on taking time; but it so happened that
his papers had been got ready quickly. At five o’clock in
the morning he was asleep—it was October, and at five in
the morning it was cold and dark. The governor of the
prison comes in on tip-toe and touches the sleeping man’s
shoulder gently. He starts up. ‘What is it?’ he says. ‘The
execution is fixed for ten o’clock.’ He was only just The Idiot
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awake, and would not believe at first, but began to argue
that his papers would not be out for a week, and so on.
When he was wide awake and realized the truth, he
became very silent and argued no more—so they say; but
after a bit he said: ‘It comes very hard on one so suddenly’
and then he was silent again and said nothing.
‘The three or four hours went by, of course, in
necessary preparations—the priest, breakfast, (coffee, meat,
and some wine they gave him; doesn’t it seem ridiculous?)
And yet I believe these people give them a good breakfast
out of pure kindness of heart, and believe that they are
doing a good action. Then he is dressed, and then begins
the procession through the town to the scaffold. I think
he, too, must feel that he has an age to live still while they
cart him along. Probably he thought, on the way, ‘Oh, I
have a long, long time yet. Three streets of life yet! When
we’ve passed this street there’ll be that other one; and then
that one where the baker’s shop is on the right; and when
shall we get there? It’s ages, ages!’ Around him are crowds
shouting, yelling—ten thousand faces, twenty thousand
eyes. All this has to be endured, and especially the
thought: ‘Here are ten thousand men, and not one of
them is going to be executed, and yet I am to die.’ Well,
all that is preparatory. The Idiot
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‘At the scaffold there is a ladder, and just there he burst
into tears—and this was a strong man, and a terribly
wicked one, they say! There was a priest with him the
whole time, talking; even in the cart as they drove along,
he talked and talked. Probably the other heard nothing; he
would begin to listen now and then, and at the third word
or so he had forgotten all about it.
‘At last he began to mount the steps; his legs were tied,
so that he had to take very small steps. The priest, who
seemed to be a wise man, had stopped talking now, and
only held the cross for the wretched fellow to kiss. At the
foot of the ladder he had been pale enough; but when he
set foot on the scaffold at the top, his face suddenly
became the colour of paper, positively like white
notepaper. His legs must have become suddenly feeble and
helpless, and he felt a choking in his throat—you know
the sudden feeling one has in moments of terrible fear,
when one does not lose one’s wits, but is absolutely
powerless to move? If some dreadful thing were suddenly
to happen; if a house were just about to fall on one;—
don’t you know how one would long to sit down and
shut one’s eyes and wait, and wait? Well, when this
terrible feeling came over him, the priest quickly pressed
the cross to his lips, without a word—a little silver cross it The Idiot
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was- and he kept on pressing it to the man’s lips every
second. And whenever the cross touched his lips, the eyes
would open for a moment, and the legs moved once, and
he kissed the cross greedily, hurriedly—just as though he
were anxious to catch hold of something in case of its
being useful to him afterwards, though he could hardly
have had any connected religious thoughts at the time.
And so up to the very block.
‘How strange that criminals seldom swoon at such a
moment! On the contrary, the brain is especially active,
and works incessantly— probably hard, hard, hard—like
an engine at full pressure. I imagine that various thoughts
must beat loud and fast through his head—all unfinished
ones, and strange, funny thoughts, very likely!—like this,
for instance: ‘That man is looking at me, and he has a wart
on his forehead! and the executioner has burst one of his
buttons, and the lowest one is all rusty!’ And meanwhile
he notices and remembers everything. There is one point
that cannot be forgotten, round which everything else
dances and turns about; and because of this point he
cannot faint, and this lasts until the very final quarter of a
second, when the wretched neck is on the block and the
victim listens and waits and KNOWS— that’s the point,
he KNOWS that he is just NOW about to die, and listens The Idiot
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for the rasp of the iron over his head. If I lay there, I
should certainly listen for that grating sound, and hear it,
too! There would probably be but the tenth part of an
instant left to hear it in, but one would certainly hear it.
And imagine, some people declare that when the head flies
off it is CONSCIOUS of having flown off! Just imagine
what a thing to realize! Fancy if consciousness were to last
for even five seconds!
‘Draw the scaffold so that only the top step of the
ladder comes in clearly. The criminal must be just stepping
on to it, his face as white as note-paper. The priest is
holding the cross to his blue lips, and the criminal kisses it,
and knows and sees and understands everything. The cross
and the head—there’s your picture; the priest and the
executioner, with his two assistants, and a few heads and
eyes below. Those might come in as subordinate
accessories—a sort of mist. There’s a picture for you.’ The
prince paused, and looked around.
‘Certainly that isn’t much like quietism,’ murmured
Alexandra, half to herself.
‘Now tell us about your love affairs,’ said Adelaida,
after a moment’s pause.
The prince gazed at her in amazement. The Idiot
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‘You know,’ Adelaida continued, ‘you owe us a
description of the Basle picture; but first I wish to hear
how you fell in love. Don’t deny the fact, for you did, of
course. Besides, you stop philosophizing when you are
telling about anything.’
‘Why are you ashamed of your stories the moment after
you have told them?’ asked Aglaya, suddenly.
‘How silly you are!’ said Mrs. Epanchin, looking
indignantly towards the last speaker.
‘Yes, that wasn’t a clever remark,’ said Alexandra.
‘Don’t listen to her, prince,’ said Mrs. Epanchin; ‘she
says that sort of thing out of mischief. Don’t think
anything of their nonsense, it means nothing. They love to
chaff, but they like you. I can see it in their faces—I know
their faces.’
‘I know their faces, too,’ said the prince, with a
peculiar stress on the words.
‘How so?’ asked Adelaida, with curiosity.
‘What do YOU know about our faces?’ exclaimed the
other two, in chorus.
But the prince was silent and serious. All awaited his
reply.
‘I’ll tell you afterwards,’ he said quietly. The Idiot
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‘Ah, you want to arouse our curiosity!’ said Aglaya.
‘And how terribly solemn you are about it!’
‘Very well,’ interrupted Adelaida, ‘then if you can read
faces so well, you must have been in love. Come now;
I’ve guessed—let’s have the secret!’
‘I have not been in love,’ said the prince, as quietly and
seriously as before. ‘I have been happy in another way.’
‘How, how?’
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ said the prince, apparently in a deep
reverie. The Idiot
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VI
‘Here you all are,’ began the prince, ‘settling yourselves
down to listen to me with so much curiosity, that if I do
not satisfy you you will probably be angry with me. No,
no! I’m only joking!’ he added, hastily, with a smile.
‘Well, then—they were all children there, and I was
always among children and only with children. They were
the children of the village in which I lived, and they went
to the school there—all of them. I did not teach them, oh
no; there was a master for that, one Jules Thibaut. I may
have taught them some things, but I was among them just
as an outsider, and I passed all four years of my life there
among them. I wished for nothing better; I used to tell
them everything and hid nothing from them. Their fathers
and relations were very angry with me, because the
children could do nothing without me at last, and used to
throng after me at all times. The schoolmaster was my
greatest enemy in the end! I had many enemies, and all
because of the children. Even Schneider reproached me.
What were they afraid of? One can tell a child everything,
anything. I have often been struck by the fact that parents
know their children so little. They should not conceal so The Idiot
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much from them. How well even little children
understand that their parents conceal things from them,
because they consider them too young to understand!
Children are capable of giving advice in the most
important matters. How can one deceive these dear little
birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I
call them birds because there is nothing in the world better
than birds!
‘However, most of the people were angry with me
about one and the same thing; but Thibaut simply was
jealous of me. At first he had wagged his head and
wondered how it was that the children understood what I
told them so well, and could not learn from him; and he
laughed like anything when I replied that neither he nor I
could teach them very much, but that THEY might teach
us a good deal.
‘How he could hate me and tell scandalous stories
about me, living among children as he did, is what I
cannot understand. Children soothe and heal the wounded
heart. I remember there was one poor fellow at our
professor’s who was being treated for madness, and you
have no idea what those children did for him, eventually. I
don’t think he was mad, but only terribly unhappy. But The Idiot
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I’ll tell you all about him another day. Now I must get on
with this story.
‘The children did not love me at first; I was such a
sickly, awkward kind of a fellow then—and I know I am
ugly. Besides, I was a foreigner. The children used to
laugh at me, at first; and they even went so far as to throw
stones at me, when they saw me kiss Marie. I only kissed
her once in my life—no, no, don’t laugh!’ The prince
hastened to suppress the smiles of his audience at this
point. ‘It was not a matter of LOVE at all! If only you
knew what a miserable creature she was, you would have
pitied her, just as I did. She belonged to our village. Her
mother was an old, old woman, and they used to sell
string and thread, and soap and tobacco, out of the
window of their little house, and lived on the pittance
they gained by this trade. The old woman was ill and very
old, and could hardly move. Marie was her daughter, a girl
of twenty, weak and thin and consumptive; but still she
did heavy work at the houses around, day by day. Well,
one fine day a commercial traveller betrayed her and
carried her off; and a week later he deserted her. She came
home dirty, draggled, and shoeless; she had walked for a
whole week without shoes; she had slept in the fields, and
caught a terrible cold; her feet were swollen and sore, and The Idiot
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her hands torn and scratched all over. She never had been
pretty even before; but her eyes were quiet, innocent,
kind eyes.
‘She was very quiet always—and I remember once,
when she had suddenly begun singing at her work,
everyone said, ‘Marie tried to sing today!’ and she got so
chaffed that she was silent for ever after. She had been
treated kindly in the place before; but when she came
back now—ill and shunned and miserable—not one of
them all had the slightest sympathy for her. Cruel people!
Oh, what hazy understandings they have on such matters!
Her mother was the first to show the way. She received
her wrathfully, unkindly, and with contempt. ‘You have
disgraced me,’ she said. She was the first to cast her into
ignominy; but when they all heard that Marie had
returned to the village, they ran out to see her and
crowded into the little cottage—old men, children,
women, girls—such a hurrying, stamping, greedy crowd.
Marie was lying on the floor at the old woman’s feet,
hungry, torn, draggled, crying, miserable.
‘When everyone crowded into the room she hid her
face in her dishevelled hair and lay cowering on the floor.
Everyone looked at her as though she were a piece of dirt
off the road. The old men scolded and condemned, and The Idiot
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the young ones laughed at her. The women condemned
her too, and looked at her contemptuously, just as though
she were some loathsome insect.
‘Her mother allowed all this to go on, and nodded her
head and encouraged them. The old woman was very ill at
that time, and knew she was dying (she really did die a
couple of months later), and though she felt the end
approaching she never thought of forgiving her daughter,
to the very day of her death. She would not even speak to
her. She made her sleep on straw in a shed, and hardly
gave her food enough to support life.
‘Marie was very gentle to her mother, and nursed her,
and did everything for her; but the old woman accepted
