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‘Ah, very angry all day, sir; all yesterday and all today.
He shows decided bacchanalian predilections at one time,
and at another is tearful and sensitive, but at any moment
he is liable to paroxysms of such rage that I assure you,
prince, I am quite alarmed. I am not a military man, you
know. Yesterday we were sitting together in the tavern,
and the lining of my coat was— quite accidentally, of
course—sticking out right in front. The general squinted
at it, and flew into a rage. He never looks me quite in the
face now, unless he is very drunk or maudlin; but
yesterday he looked at me in such a way that a shiver went
all down my back. I intend to find the purse tomorrow;
but till then I am going to have another night of it with
him.’
‘What’s the good of tormenting him like this?’ cried
the prince.
‘I don’t torment him, prince, I don’t indeed!’ cried
Lebedeff, hotly. ‘I love him, my dear sir, I esteem him;
and believe it or not, I love him all the better for this
business, yes—and value him more.’
Lebedeff said this so seriously that the prince quite lost
his temper with him.
‘Nonsense! love him and torment him so! Why, by the
very fact that he put the purse prominently before you, The Idiot
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first under the chair and then in your lining, he shows that
he does not wish to deceive you, but is anxious to beg
your forgiveness in this artless way. Do you hear? He is
asking your pardon. He confides in the delicacy of your
feelings, and in your friendship for him. And you can
allow yourself to humiliate so thoroughly honest a man!’
‘Thoroughly honest, quite so, prince, thoroughly
honest!’ said Lebedeff, with flashing eyes. ‘And only you,
prince, could have found so very appropriate an
expression. I honour you for it, prince. Very well, that’s
settled; I shall find the purse now and not tomorrow.
Here, I find it and take it out before your eyes! And the
money is all right. Take it, prince, and keep it till
tomorrow, will you? Tomorrow or next day I’ll take it
back again. I think, prince, that the night after its
disappearance it was buried under a bush in the garden. So
I believe—what do you think of that?’
‘Well, take care you don’t tell him to his face that you
have found the purse. Simply let him see that it is no
longer in the lining of your coat, and form his own
conclusions.’
‘Do you think so? Had I not just better tell him I have
found it, and pretend I never guessed where it was?’ The Idiot
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‘No, I don’t think so,’ said the prince, thoughtfully; ‘it’s
too late for that—that would be dangerous now. No, no!
Better say nothing about it. Be nice with him, you know,
but don’t show him —oh, YOU know well enough—‘
‘I know, prince, of course I know, but I’m afraid I shall
not carry it out; for to do so one needs a heart like your
own. He is so very irritable just now, and so proud. At
one moment he will embrace me, and the next he flies out
at me and sneers at me, and then I stick the lining forward
on purpose. Well, au revoir, prince, I see I am keeping
you, and boring you, too, interfering with your most
interesting private reflections.’
‘Now, do be careful! Secrecy, as before!’
‘Oh, silence isn’t the word! Softly, softly!’
But in spite of this conclusion to the episode, the
prince remained as puzzled as ever, if not more so. He
awaited next morning’s interview with the general most
impatiently. The Idiot
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IV
THE time appointed was twelve o’clock, and the
prince, returning home unexpectedly late, found the
general waiting for him. At the first glance, he saw that the
latter was displeased, perhaps because he had been kept
waiting. The prince apologized, and quickly took a seat.
He seemed strangely timid before the general this
morning, for some reason, and felt as though his visitor
were some piece of china which he was afraid of breaking.
On scrutinizing him, the prince soon saw that the
general was quite a different man from what he had been
the day before; he looked like one who had come to some
momentous resolve. His calmness, however, was more
apparent than real. He was courteous, but there was a
suggestion of injured innocence in his manner.
‘I’ve brought your book back,’ he began, indicating a
book lying on the table. ‘Much obliged to you for lending
it to me.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, did you read it, general? It’s curious,
isn’t it?’ said the prince, delighted to be able to open up
conversation upon an outside subject. The Idiot
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‘Curious enough, yes, but crude, and of course dreadful
nonsense; probably the man lies in every other sentence.’
The general spoke with considerable confidence, and
dragged his words out with a conceited drawl.
‘Oh, but it’s only the simple tale of an old soldier who
saw the French enter Moscow. Some of his remarks were
wonderfully interesting. Remarks of an eye-witness are
always valuable, whoever he be, don’t you think so
‘Had I been the publisher I should not have printed it.
As to the evidence of eye-witnesses, in these days people
prefer impudent lies to the stories of men of worth and
long service. I know of some notes of the year 1812,
which—I have determined, prince, to leave this house,
Mr. Lebedeff’s house.’
The general looked significantly at his host.
‘Of course you have your own lodging at Pavlofsk at—
at your daughter’s house,’ began the prince, quite at a loss
what to say. He suddenly recollected that the general had
come for advice on a most important matter, affecting his
destiny.
‘At my wife’s; in other words, at my own place, my
daughter’s house.’
‘I beg your pardon, I—‘ The Idiot
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‘I leave Lebedeff’s house, my dear prince, because I
have quarrelled with this person. I broke with him last
night, and am very sorry that I did not do so before. I
expect respect, prince, even from those to whom I give
my heart, so to speak. Prince, I have often given away my
heart, and am nearly always deceived. This person was
quite unworthy of the gift.’
‘There is much that might be improved in him,’ said
the prince, moderately, ‘but he has some qualities which—
though amid them one cannot but discern a cunning
nature—reveal what is often a diverting intellect.’
The prince’s tone was so natural and respectful that the
general could not possibly suspect him of any insincerity.
‘Oh, that he possesses good traits, I was the first to
show, when I very nearly made him a present of my
friendship. I am not dependent upon his hospitality, and
upon his house; I have my own family. I do not attempt
to justify my own weakness. I have drunk with this man,
and perhaps I deplore the fact now, but I did not take him
up for the sake of drink alone (excuse the crudeness of the
expression, prince); I did not make friends with him for
that alone. I was attracted by his good qualities; but when
the fellow declares that he was a child in 1812, and had his
left leg cut off, and buried in the Vagarkoff cemetery, in The Idiot
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Moscow, such a cock-and-bull story amounts to
disrespect, my dear sir, to—to impudent exaggeration.’
‘Oh, he was very likely joking; he said it for fun.’
‘I quite understand you. You mean that an innocent lie
for the sake of a good joke is harmless, and does not
offend the human heart. Some people lie, if you like to
put it so, out of pure friendship, in order to amuse their
fellows; but when a man makes use of extravagance in
order to show his disrespect and to make clear how the
intimacy bores him, it is time for a man of honour to
break off the said intimacy., and to teach the offender his
place.’
The general flushed with indignation as he spoke.
‘Oh, but Lebedeff cannot have been in Moscow in
1812. He is much too young; it is all nonsense.’
‘Very well, but even if we admit that he was alive in
1812, can one believe that a French chasseur pointed a
cannon at him for a lark, and shot his left leg off? He says
he picked his own leg up and took it away and buried it in
the cemetery. He swore he had a stone put up over it with
the inscription: ‘Here lies the leg of Collegiate Secretary
Lebedeff,’ and on the other side, ‘Rest, beloved ashes, till
the morn of joy,’ and that he has a service read over it
every year (which is simply sacrilege), and goes to The Idiot
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Moscow once a year on purpose. He invites me to
Moscow in order to prove his assertion, and show me his
leg’s tomb, and the very cannon that shot him; he says it’s
the eleventh from the gate of the Kremlin, an old-
fashioned falconet taken from the French afterwards.’
‘And, meanwhile both his legs are still on his body,’
said the prince, laughing. ‘I assure you, it is only an
innocent joke, and you need not be angry about it.’
‘Excuse me—wait a minute—he says that the leg we
see is a wooden one, made by Tchernosvitoff.’
‘They do say one can dance with those!’
‘Quite so, quite so; and he swears that his wife never
found out that one of his legs was wooden all the while
they were married. When I showed him the ridiculousness
of all this, he said, ‘Well, if you were one of Napoleon’s
pages in 1812, you might let me bury my leg in the
Moscow cemetery.’
‘Why, did you say—’ began the prince, and paused in
confusion.
The general gazed at his host disdainfully.
‘Oh, go on,’ he said, ‘finish your sentence, by all
means. Say how odd it appears to you that a man fallen to
such a depth of humiliation as I, can ever have been the The Idiot
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actual eye-witness of great events. Go on, I don’t mind!
Has he found time to tell you scandal about me?’
‘No, I’ve heard nothing of this from Lebedeff, if you
mean Lebedeff.’
‘H’m; I thought differently. You see, we were talking
over this period of history. I was criticizing a current
report of something which then happened, and having
been myself an eye- witness of the occurrence—you are
smiling, prince—you are looking at my face as if—‘
‘Oh no! not at all—I—‘
‘I am rather young-looking, I know; but I am actually
older than I appear to be. I was ten or eleven in the year
1812. I don’t know my age exactly, but it has always been
a weakness of mine to make it out less than it really is.
‘I assure you, general, I do not in the least doubt your
statement. One of our living autobiographers states that
when he was a small baby in Moscow in 1812 the French
soldiers fed him with bread.’
‘Well, there you see!’ said the general,
condescendingly. ‘There is nothing whatever unusual
about my tale. Truth very often appears to be impossible. I
was a page—it sounds strange, I dare say. Had I been
fifteen years old I should probably have been terribly
frightened when the French arrived, as my mother was The Idiot
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(who had been too slow about clearing out of Moscow);
but as I was only just ten I was not in the least alarmed,
and rushed through the crowd to the very door of the
palace when Napoleon alighted from his horse.’
‘Undoubtedly, at ten years old you would not have felt
the sense of fear, as you say,’ blurted out the prince,
horribly uncomfortable in the sensation that he was just
about to blush.
‘Of course; and it all happened so easily and naturally.
And yet, were a novelist to describe the episode, he would
put in all kinds of impossible and incredible details.’
‘Oh,’ cried the prince, ‘I have often thought that! Why,
I know of a murder, for the sake of a watch. It’s in all the
papers now. But if some writer had invented it, all the
critics would have jumped down his throat and said the
thing was too improbable for anything. And yet you read
it in the paper, and you can’t help thinking that out of
these strange disclosures is to be gained the full knowledge
of Russian life and character. You said that well, general; it
is so true,’ concluded the prince, warmly, delighted to
have found a refuge from the fiery blushes which had
covered his face.
‘Yes, it’s quite true, isn’t it?’ cried the general, his eyes
sparkling with gratification. ‘A small boy, a child, would The Idiot
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naturally realize no danger; he would shove his way
through the crowds to see the shine and glitter of the
uniforms, and especially the great man of whom everyone
was speaking, for at that time all the world had been
talking of no one but this man for some years past. The
world was full of his name; I—so to speak—drew it in
with my mother’s milk. Napoleon, passing a couple of
paces from me, caught sight of me accidentally. I was very
well dressed, and being all alone, in that crowd, as you will
easily imagine...
‘Oh, of course! Naturally the sight impressed him, and
proved to him that not ALL the aristocracy had left
Moscow; that at least some nobles and their children had
remained behind.’
Just so just so! He wanted to win over the aristocracy!
When his eagle eye fell on me, mine probably flashed back
in response.’ Voila un garcon bien eveille! Qui est ton
pere?’ I immediately replied, almost panting with
excitement, ‘A general, who died on the battle-fields of his
country! ‘Le fils d’un boyard et d’un brave, pardessus le
marche. J’aime les boyards. M’aimes-tu, petit?’ To this
keen question I replied as keenly, ‘The Russian heart can
recognize a great man even in the bitter enemy of his
country.’ At least, I don’t remember the exact words, you The Idiot
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know, but the idea was as I say. Napoleon was struck; he
thought a minute and then said to his suite: ‘I like that
boy’s pride; if all Russians think like this child’, then he
didn’t finish, hut went on and entered the palace. I
instantly mixed with his suite, and followed him. I was
