ger believes in the Moscow bells; Rome, laurels.... But
he has no belief in laurels even.... We have a conventional attack of
Byronic spleen, a grimace from Heine, something of Petchorin--and the
machine goes on rolling, whistling, at full speed. "But you may praise
me, you may praise me, that I like extremely; it's only in a manner of
speaking that I lay down the pen; I shall bore you three hundred times
more, you'll grow weary of reading me...."

Of course it did not end without trouble; but the worst of it was that
it was his own doing. People had for some time begun shuffling their
feet, blowing their noses, coughing, and doing everything that people
do when a lecturer, whoever he may be, keeps an audience for longer than
twenty minutes at a literary matinee. But the genius noticed nothing of
all this. He went on lisping and mumbling, without giving a thought to
the audience, so that every one began to wonder. Suddenly in a back row
a solitary but loud voice was heard:

"Good Lord, what nonsense!"

The exclamation escaped involuntarily, and I am sure was not intended
as a demonstration. The man was simply worn out. But Mr. Karmazinov
stopped, looked sarcastically at the audience, and suddenly lisped with
the deportment of an aggrieved _kammerherr._

"I'm afraid I've been boring you dreadfully, gentlemen?"

That was his blunder, that he was the first to speak; for provoking an
answer in this way he gave an opening for the rabble to speak, too, and
even legitimately, so to say, while if he had restrained himself, people
would have gone on blowing their noses and it would have passed off
somehow. Perhaps he expected applause in response to his question, but
there was no sound of applause; on the contrary, every one seemed to
subside and shrink back in dismay.

"You never did see Ancus Marcius, that's all brag," cried a voice that
sounded full of irritation and even nervous exhaustion.

"Just so," another voice agreed at once. "There are no such things as
ghosts nowadays, nothing but natural science. Look it up in a scientific
book."

"Gentlemen, there was nothing I expected less than such objections,"
said Karmazinov, extremely surprised. The great genius had completely
lost touch with his Fatherland in Karlsruhe.

"Nowadays it's outrageous to say that the world stands on three fishes,"
a young lady snapped out suddenly. "You can't have gone down to the
hermit's cave, Karmazinov. And who talks about hermits n