bandoning his experiments, this unfortunate man took to reading a
volume of light literature. What did he open on? The loves of great
and nobly-born men for lowly-born and inferior women. Thus Lord
Douglas fell in love with a shepherdess, and became a shepherd for her
sake; Count Pelletier took for his wife a gypsy girl, and went about
the streets turning an organ; Bernadotte, the King of Sweden, sought
the hand of a young girl who watched a flock of geese for a farmer;
Archduke John married the daughter of a postmaster; and another
Austrian duke raised an actress to the position of grand duchess; the
consort of Peter the Great was the daughter of a villager; a Bonaparte
married a washerwoman who had been his mistress.

And why not? Are not beauty, sweetness, fidelity, and true worth to be
found under a woollen as well as under a silken frock? And, on the
other hand, do we not find sinners enough in the upper circles?

Did not Zoraida kill her own children, and was she not a born
princess? Faustina took money from her lovers, although she was the
daughter of an emperor; the Marquise Astorgas ran a hairpin through
her husband's heart; Semiramis strewed a whole churchyard with the
corpses of her spouses; King Otto was poisoned in a grove by his
queen; Joanna of Naples treasured the ribbon with which the king, her
husband, was strangled; Jeanne Lafolle tormented her husband to death;
the Empress Catharine betrayed her sovereign and consort, and connived
at his murder; and the Borgias, Tudors, Cillis, all had wives who
became notorious in that they wore entwined in their crowns the girdle
of Aphrodite.

And do we not find the most exalted virtue in what is called low life?
The actress Gaussin, to whom her wealthy lover gave a check with
_carte blanche_ to write a million thereupon, only wrote that she
would always love him, Quintilla, another actress, bit off her tongue,
lest she should betray her lover, who was implicated in a conspiracy;
Alice, who undertook to fight a duel for her husband, and was killed;
and many others who have suffered silently and died for very love.

Philosophy and history both conspired against Ivan. And then came
sleep.

A dream is a magic mirror in which we see ourselves as we would be if
our own wishes and inclinations were all-powerful. In his dream the
bald man has hair and the blind sees.

Towards the end of the following week Ivan made the discovery that he
had lost the use of his und