ight understand it. Do you
understand that?"

"I don't understand."

"_Tant mieux; passons._ I am very irritable to-day."

"But why have you been arguing with him, Stepan Trofimovitch?" I asked
him reproachfully.

"_Je voulais convertir_--you'll laugh of course--_cette pauvre_ auntie,
_elle entendra de belles choses!_ Oh, my dear boy, would you believe it.
I felt like a patriot. I always recognised that I was a Russian,
however.. . a genuine Russian must be like you and me. _Il y a la dedans
quelque chose d'aveugle et de louche._"

"Not a doubt of it," I assented.

"My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To
make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it.
Men have always done so. Perhaps there's something in it that passes our
understanding. What do you think: is there something we don't understand
in that triumphant squeal? I should like to think there was. I should
like to think so."

I did not speak. He, too, was silent for a long time. "They say that
French cleverness..." he babbled suddenly, as though in a fever...
"that's false, it always has been. Why libel French cleverness? It's
simply Russian indolence, our degrading impotence to produce ideas, our
revolting parasitism in the rank of nations. _Ils sont tout simplement
des paresseux,_ and not French cleverness. Oh, the Russians ought to be
extirpated for the good of humanity, like noxious parasites! We've been
striving for something utterly, utterly different. I can make nothing of
it. I have given up understanding. 'Do you understand,' I cried to him,
'that if you have the guillotine in the foreground of your programme and
are so enthusiastic about it too, it's simply because nothing's easier
than cutting off heads, and nothing's harder than to have an idea. _Vous
etes des paresseux! Votre drapeau est un guenille, une impuissance._ It's
those carts, or, what was it?... the rumble of the carts carrying bread
to humanity being more important than the Sistine Madonna, or, what's
the saying?... _une betise dans ce genre._ Don't you understand, don't you
understand,' I said to him, 'that unhappiness is just as necessary to
man as happiness.' _Il rit._ 'All you do is to make a _bon mot,_' he
said, 'with your limbs snug on a velvet sofa.'... (He used a coarser
expression.) And this habit of addressing a father so familiarly is very
nice when father and son are on good terms, but what do you think of it
whe