I don't have visitors everyday now. I'll mention only the visits of Nicolas and Piotr Ignatievich. Nicolas comes to me usually on holidays, pretending to come on business, but really to see me. He is very hilarious, a thing which never happens to him in the winter.
"Well, what have you got to say?" I ask him, coming out into the passage.
"Your Excellency!" he says, pressing his hand to his heart and looking at me with a lover's rapture. "Your Excellency! So help me God! God strike me where I stand! Gaudeamus igitur juvenestus."
And he kisses me eagerly on the shoulders, on my sleeves, and buttons.
"Is everything all right over there?" I ask.
"Your Excellency! I swear to God...."
He never stops swearing, quite unnecessarily, and I soon get bored, and send him to the kitchen, where they give him dinner. Piotr Ignatievich also comes on holidays specially to visit me and communicate his thoughts to me. He usually sits by the table in my room, modest, clean, judicious, without daring to cross his legs or lean his elbows on the table, all the while telling me in a quiet, even voice what he considers very piquant items of news gathered from journals and pamphlets.
These items are all alike and can be reduced to the following type: A Frenchman made a discovery. Another—a German—exposed him by showing that this discovery had been made as long ago as 1870 by some American. Then a third—also a German—outwitted them both by showing that both of them had been confused, by taking spherules of air under a microscope for dark pigment. Even when he wants to make me laugh, Piotr Ignatievich tells his story at great length, very much as though he were defending a thesis, enumerating his literary sources in detail, with every effort to avoid mistakes in the dates, the particular number of the journal and the names. Moreover, he does not say Petit simply but inevitably, Jean Jacques Petit. If he happens to stay to dinner, he will tell the same sort of piquant stories and drive all the company to despondency. If Gnekker and Liza begin to speak of fugues and counter-fugues in his presence he modestly lowers his eyes, and his face falls. He is ashamed that such trivialities should be spoken of in the presence of such serious men as him and me.
In my present state of mind five minutes are enough for him to bore me as though I had seen and listened to him for a whole eternity. I hate the poor man. I wither away beneath his quiet, even voice and his bookish language. His stories make me stupid.... He cherishes the kindliest feelings towards me and talks to me only to give me pleasure. I reward him by staring at his face as if I wanted to hypnotise him, and thinking "Go away. Go, go...." But he is proof against my mental suggestion and sits, sits, sits....
While he sits with me I cannot rid myself of the idea: "When I die, it's quite possible that he will be appointed in my place." Then my poor audience appears to me as an oasis where the stream has dried, up, and I am unkind to Piotr Ignatievich, and silent and morose as if he were guilty of such thoughts and not I myself. When he begins, as usual, to glorify the German scholars, I no longer jest good-naturedly, but murmur sternly: