“Ah, it might have been thought so; yet I know the way in which such things are bought in the market-place. They are bought by some rascal of a cook whom a Frenchman has taught how to skin a tomcat and then serve it up as hare.”
“Ugh! What horrible things you say!” put in Madame.
“Well, my dear, that is how things are done, and it is no fault of mine that it is so. Moreover, everything that is left over—everything that WE (pardon me for mentioning it) cast into the slop-pail—is used by such folk for making soup.”
“Always at table you begin talking like this!” objected his helpmeet.
“And why not?” said Sobakevitch. “I tell you straight that I would not eat such nastiness, even had I made it myself. Sugar a frog as much as you like, but never shall it pass MY lips. Nor would I swallow an oyster, for I know only too well what an oyster may resemble. But have some mutton, friend Chichikov. It is shoulder of mutton, and very different stuff from the mutton which they cook in noble kitchens—mutton which has been kicking about the market-place four days or more. All that sort of cookery has been invented by French and German doctors, and I should like to hang them for having done so. They go and prescribe diets and a hunger cure as though what suits their flaccid German systems will agree with a Russian stomach! Such devices are no good at all.” Sobakevitch shook his head wrathfully. “Fellows like those are for ever talking of civilisation. As if THAT sort of thing was civilisation! Phew!” (Perhaps the speaker’s concluding exclamation would have been even stronger had he not been seated at table.) “For myself, I will have none of it. When I eat pork at a meal, give me the WHOLE pig; when mutton, the WHOLE sheep; when goose, the WHOLE of the bird. Two dishes are better than a thousand, provided that one can eat of them as much as one wants.”
And he proceeded to put precept into practice by taking half the shoulder of mutton on to his plate, and then devouring it down to the last morsel of gristle and bone.
“My word!” reflected Chichikov. “The fellow has a pretty good holding capacity!”
“None of it for me,” repeated Sobakevitch as he wiped his hands on his napkin. “I don’t intend to be like a fellow named Plushkin, who owns eight hundred souls, yet dines worse than does my shepherd.”
“Who is Plushkin?” asked Chichikov.
“A miser,” replied Sobakevitch. “Such a miser as never you could imagine. Even convicts in prison live better than he does. And he starves his servants as well.”