m the French," Liputin cried with positive
fury, jumping up from his chair. "That is taken from the universal
language of humanity, not simply from the French. From the language of
the universal social republic and harmony of mankind, let me tell you!
Not simply from the French!"

"Foo! hang it all! There's no such language!" laughed Nikolay.

Sometimes a trifle will catch the attention and exclusively absorb it
for a time. Most of what I have to tell of young Stavrogin will come
later. But I will note now as a curious fact that of all the impressions
made on him by his stay in our town, the one most sharply imprinted
on his memory was the unsightly and almost abject figure of the little
provincial official, the coarse and jealous family despot, the miserly
money-lender who picked up the candle-ends and scraps left from dinner,
and was at the same time a passionate believer in some visionary future
"social harmony," who at night gloated in ecstasies over fantastic
pictures of a future phalanstery, in the approaching realisation of
which, in Russia, and in our province, he believed as firmly as in his
own existence. And that in the very place where he had saved up to
buy himself a "little home," where he had married for the second time,
getting a dowry with his bride, where perhaps, for a hundred miles round
there was not one man, himself included, who was the very least like a
future member "of the universal human republic and social harmony."

"God knows how these people come to exist!" Nikolay wondered, recalling
sometimes the unlooked-for Fourierist.

IV

Our prince travelled for over three years, so that he was almost
forgotten in the town. We learned from Stepan Trofimovitch that he
had travelled all over Europe, that he had even been in Egypt and had
visited Jerusalem, and then had joined some scientific expedition to
Iceland, and he actually did go to Iceland. It was reported too that he
had spent one winter attending lectures in a German university. He did
not write often to his mother, twice a year, or even less, but Varvara
Petrovna was not angry or offended at this. She accepted submissively
and without repining the relations that had been established once for
all between her son and herself. She fretted for her "Nicolas" and
dreamed of him continually. She kept her dreams and lamentations to
herself. She seemed to have become less intimate even with Stepan
Trofimovitch. She was forming secret projects