negro boys, delicate-shaped greyhounds and
shrieking parrots, she died on a crooked silken divan of the time of
Louis XV., with an enamelled snuff-box of Petitot's workmanship in her
hand--and died, deserted by her husband; the insinuating M. Courtin had
preferred to remove to Paris with her money. Ivan had only reached
his twentieth year when this unexpected blow (we mean the princess's
marriage, not her death) fell upon him; he did not care to stay in his
aunt's house, where he found himself suddenly transformed from a wealthy
heir to a poor relation; the society in Petersburg in which he had grown
up was closed to him; he felt an aversion for entering the government
service in the lower grades, with nothing but hard work and obscurity
before him,--this was at the very beginning of the reign of the Emperor
Alexander. He was obliged reluctantly to return to the country to his
father. How squalid, poor, and wretched his parents' home seemed to him!
The stagnation and sordidness of life in the country offended him at
every step. He was consumed with ennui. Moreover, every one in the
house, except his mother, looked at him with unfriendly eyes. His father
did not like his town manners, his swallow-tail coats, his frilled
shirt-fronts, his books, his flute, his fastidious ways, in which he
detected--not incorrectly--a disgust for his surroundings; he was for
ever complaining and grumbling at his son. "Nothing here," he used to
say, "is to his taste; at table he is all in a fret, and doesn't eat;
he can't bear the heat and close smell of the room; the sight of folks
drunk upsets him, one daren't beat any one before him; he doesn't want
to go into the government service; he's weakly, as you see, in health;
fie upon him, the milksop! And all this because he's got his head full
of Voltaire." The old man had a special dislike to Voltaire, and the
"fanatic" Diderot, though he had not read a word of their words; reading
was not in his line. Piotr Andreitch was not mistaken; his son's head
for that matter was indeed full of both Diderot and Voltaire, and not
only of them alone, of Rousseau too, and Helvetius, and many other
writers of the same kind--but they were in his head only. The retired
abbe and encyclopedist who had been Ivan Petrovitch's tutor had taken
pleasure in pouring all the wisdom of the eighteenth century into his
pupil, and he was simply brimming over with it; it was there in him, but
without mixing in his blood, no