“Cher, I could crush them!” broke from him on Thursday evening after his second interview with Pyotr Stepanovitch, when he lay stretched on the sofa with his head wrapped in a towel.
Till that moment he had not uttered one word all day.
“Fils, fils, cher,” and so on, “I agree all those expressions are nonsense, kitchen talk, and so be it. I see it for myself. I never gave him food or drink, I sent him a tiny baby from Berlin to X province by post, and all that, I admit it.… ‘You gave me neither food nor drink, and sent me by post,’ he says, ‘and what’s more you’ve robbed me here.’”
“‘But you unhappy boy,’ I cried to him, ‘my heart has been aching for you all my life; though I did send you by post.’ Il rit.”
“But I admit it. I admit it, granted it was by post,” he concluded, almost in delirium.
“Passons,” he began again, five minutes later. “I don’t understand Turgenev. That Bazarov of his is a fictitious figure, it does not exist anywhere. The fellows themselves were the first to disown him as unlike anyone. That Bazarov is a sort of indistinct mixture of Nozdryov and Byron, c’est le mot. Look at them attentively: they caper about and squeal with joy like puppies in the sun. They are happy, they are victorious! What is there of Byron in them!… and with that, such ordinariness! What a low-bred, irritable vanity! What an abject craving to faire du bruit autour de son nom, without noticing that son nom.… Oh, it’s a caricature! ‘Surely,’ I cried to him, ‘you don’t want to offer yourself just as you are as a substitute for Christ?’ Il rit. Il rit beaucoup. Il rit trop. He has a strange smile. His mother had not a smile like that. Il rit toujours.”
Silence followed again.
“They are cunning; they were acting in collusion on Sunday,” he blurted out suddenly.…
“Oh, not a doubt of it,” I cried, pricking up my ears. “It was a got-up thing and it was too transparent, and so badly acted.”
“I don’t mean that. Do you know that it was all too transparent on purpose, that those … who had to, might understand it. Do you understand that?”